Upon reading the chapter titled “Field Trip”, I decided to look into some of the things that Tim O’Brien claims, trying to find some differences between “Author Tim” and “Story Tim”. The first major difference that I discovered was that Tim O’Brien does not, in fact have a daughter named Kathleen. He doesn’t have any daughters, actually. This didn’t entirely surprise me, but it did cause me to wonder what her purpose was: what “story-truth” she exposed through her invention. It seems to me that Kathleen functions in a way similar to Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird, a young, innocent pair of eyes with which to view and question the situation presented by the author.

If Kathleen is not real, then it is also possible that O’Brien never really made this return journey. If that is the case, then one has to wonder what O’Brien is hoping to accomplish through the retelling of this invented “homecoming” to the field. One possibility is that O’Brien is imagining for himself what a return would accomplish for himself, allowing him to finally feel for sure that “All that’s finished.” (179). I’m not sure O’Brien, nor myself, fully believe this, though, as countless times throughout the novel O’Brien says how through the act of retelling he is able to bring himself back to those days. In this way I think that the trip is a physical expression of his act of writing. Through writing down all of these stories, true or false, O’Brien is able to “return” to Vietnam and simultaneously move on while also living those stories out again and again.