You can tell a story a million times and never get it right. How many of us do that--change the wording, or the facts, just a little bit, when we're telling our friends stories, just to make it funnier or more profound? Often what makes a story great isn't what happens, it's how the story is told. I know that as i repeat a story, I get better at telling it, more confident in what I'm saying, more sure that is the right way to go about it. And it often pays off -- the last time I tell a story is usually far superior to the first try. That's why we rewrite essays, isn't it? Because with every edit, the story gets better, your points get clearer. This principle holds true for both the characters in The Things They Carried and O'Brien as a novelist.
We see when it Sanders tries to tell the story about the mountain music to Tim, and isn't satisfied with the first tale. He's frustrated with "not quite getting the details right, not quite pinning down the final and definitive truth" (72). That's why he can't let it go -- he has to go up to Tim later and elaborate, tell him what the moral of the story is. Rat Kiley deals with the same issue when he's telling the story of Mary Anne -- his audience gets fed up with the story because of the way he tells it, Sanders advising him to "get a consistent sound" (102). Maybe then they'd believe him.
O'Brien the novelist struggles with the correct way to tell a story as well; that's why we see so much repetition throughout the book. He keeps writing about the war, each time trying to get it a little more right, in an attempt to get his readers to see the whole truth--of war, of peace, of hate, of love, of life. The Things They Carried is a composite of short stories, most of which have been published in different forms, and in packaging them together, O'Brien is tweaking the entire story just a little bit. Even though the individual stories themselves have all been previously relayed, O'Brien tells them differently every time, in order to arrive at the truth -- not the truth of what really happened, but the truth of what he and other soldiers felt during the Vietnam War. He wants us to feel what he felt, like on the river when he asks the reader to imagine that "You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest" (54). And later, when he tells the story of Curt Lemon and Rat Kiley and the baby buffalo, when the woman doesn't understand what he meant. The story has failed him. He hasn't told it right; she doesn't get it. So he repeats it, because "all you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth… you can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it" (81). Someday someone will understand what he's trying to say about war, and until then, the repetition is necessary.
This is an interesting point - although the reader is responsible for a large majority of understanding the piece, the author needs to design the story to be clear and effective. Although there may be a good authorial intent in telling of a tale, a lot of a story can simply just not "work" in manipulating the reader if told wrong. How does an author tell a story "right"? As you said, after retelling and retelling it to see what works. This would lead to some saying that a story is being told "untruly", but really, what story can be told effectively in it's actuality? No one can retell a true experience to the degree that they experienced it, and a honed story is the next closest thing.
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