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Truth In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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For many soldiers returning home from war, the truth about what happened can be a hard and confusing thing. The book The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, and published in 1990, describes his time in the war. O’Brien struggles the whole time with differentiating his emotional memories with events that actually happened, and tries to impress upon the reader what it was actually like to be over in Vietnam. O’brien believes that war stories do not always accurately portray what war was like, and that is why story-truth can be truer than the happening-truth.

In this book Tim O’Brien explains the difference of what he calls “story-truth” and “happening-truth”. “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way” (71). Happening-truth is actual events that happened with real people in a real time. Story-truth may not have actually …show more content…

O’Brien presents a story in which he kills an innocent Vietnamese man walking through the woods. He describes the guilt and remorse he feels for his actions. He references this story several times throughout the book. Around the third time he admits that the guy he specifically described was not real, and that in fact he never killed anyone in the war, but the fact that he witnessed so many deaths put him at fault. “I remember his face, which was not a pretty face because his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present” (179). Though the happening-truth was that O’Brien never killed anyone during the war, the story-truth made up by O’Brien himself is that he did. The emotions he felt were of such strong grief that that what he remembers and tells is that he killed someone, because in his mind he

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