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The Things They Carried

by Tim O’Brien

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Discussion Topic

The challenge of conveying the truth in war stories in The Things They Carried

Summary:

The Things They Carried explores the challenge of conveying the truth in war stories by blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Tim O'Brien emphasizes that the emotional truth of a story can be more impactful than factual accuracy, suggesting that the essence of war experiences often transcends literal events, capturing the deeper realities of soldiers' emotions and memories.

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Why is it hard to "tell a true war story" in The Things They Carried?

It is hard to tell a true war story because it is impossible to accurately capture all of the things that war actually is. O'Brien says that a "true war story is never moral. It does not instruct [...]." We should not feel uplifted at the end because there is nothing uplifting about war, and a war story that does this is not a true one. Later, however, O'Brien says that "if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out [...] without unraveling the deeper meaning." So, a true war story cannot be moral, but it might have a moral.

However, if it does have a moral, then the moral isn't a message that we can simply identify neatly; when we try to do this, we unravel the whole story and make it meaningless. Further, in a true war story, he says, "it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen." Things that only seem to have happened can somehow be just as true as things that actually did happen. Moreover, "In many cases a true war story cannot be believed." If it seems really believable, then it probably isn't true. War is, apparently, mostly unbelievable. In addition to this, a true war story "never seems to end." In the end,

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

The truths about war, he says, "are contradictory." He explains that war is grotesque but also beautiful. It contains horror and majesty. War is astonishing and hateful and ugly, but it does possess a "powerful, implacable beauty." In short, "Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true." A true war story is hard, perhaps impossible, to tell, because it contains so many contradictions that it simply unravels. It becomes a collection of ideas—some which are true and others which might be totally fabricated—that the storyteller shapes over and over, trying to make it right, but it never really can be because it is impossible to get it just right. And so, O'Brien says that you "can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it."

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In what sense is a "true" war story actually true in The Things They Carried?

In "How to Tell a True War Story," Tim O'Brien tells of an incident in Vietnam in which his buddy "Rat" Kiley watched a friend blown to bits because he stepped on a booby-trapped 105 round, then takes out his anguish on a baby water buffalo, shooting it in various places, torturing it to death while the rest of the men watched dumbly. In the end, O'Brien tells us that none of it is true: "No Mitchell Sanders, you tell her. No Lemon, no Rat Kiley. To trail junction. No baby buffalo. No vines or moss or white blossoms. Beginning to end, you tell her, it's all made up." And yet...he's telling us how to tell a true war story. 

His notion of truth isn't about simple events; it's about how it feels to be there, to experience the loneliness, the love, the beauty, the horror, the pain and confusion and boredom and heartbreak. To get at this sort of truth, he has discovered, you can't just tell what happened. Perhaps the historical truth is too cliche to "make your stomach believe" (78). A true war story, in O'Brien's view, makes you "believe by the raw force of feeling" (74). What "seems to happen" is more important than the raw facts (71). Perhaps most importantly, "if at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie" (68-9)--that lie being the same one Wilfred Owen wrote about in "Dulce et Decorum Est"--"it is sweet and meet (fitting) to die for one's country." 

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