A Made-Up True Story

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien delves into his personal interpretation of how to distinguish the truth, as it was experienced, from a list of hard facts. Throughout the course of the first 136 pages, and, if my recollection from junior year is correct, the entire book the author moves fluidly between what is fact and what is fiction, and yet seems to believe that all of it is the truth.

The example that I find the most clear is the story of the man O’Brien killed, combined with a description of Rat Kiley’s storytelling on page 101. Kiley “had a tendency to stop now and then, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion……[he] couldn't help it. He wanted to bracket the full range of meaning.” I think that O’Brien does not believe that simple facts can convey the real truth of a war story.

Here is the story of how Tim O’Brien killed a man, as simply as I can say it. An armed Vietnamese man came up the trail O’Brien was guarding, and our narrator killed him with a grenade.

This telling doesn’t give much room for us to empathize with just how it would have felt to truly experience it, does it?

In his telling of the story, O’Brien delves into a back story that, while perhaps not factually accurate, gives us more of an idea of how he truly felt during these events. There are swirling stories and ideas of this victim’s past based off of details from the scene, such as his small wrists inspiring O’Brien to believe he was bullied when he was younger. This humanizes the victim, and sheds light, to me at least, on the kind of guilt and other emotions that O’Brien may have felt during this occurrence. Is it all factual? Not necessarily. But is it a truer version of the events as O’Brien experienced them? I think so.