Things They Carried True

In times of war, many men and women tend to forget or alter their memories. Thoughts became mixed up, the sense of time becomes delayed, and the telling of one man’s experience does not seem possibly true. In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien writes about realistic events that never truly happened to him while he was at war. Nevertheless, he goes on telling about in writing a war story, a person can never remember the full event or will change it in a way that is not true. War will bring the worst out in people, and often, many of the men and women who live through it, cannot tell the full tale.

In The Things They Carried, O’Brien has a whole section on how to tell a true war story. Being a veteran of the war in Vietnam, O’Brien knows firsthand what happened in those years overseas. But early on he does claim that the novel he had written was not true. When O’Brien told of the death of his friend and comrade, Curt Lemon, O’Brien would go into detail about how he died. O’Brien never left out any information about how a body is mangled and mutilated in the time of their death. However, O’Brien did say, “When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself.

When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot” (O’Brien 1990 p 71). O’Brien means by this that in times of war, even the soldiers are frightened and look away when a fellow soldier dies. Though the death may seem like a graceful death, no one there wanted to see a person die. They all looked away. So the true story of Curt Lemon’s death is not known for sure. No matter how true one may claim their story to be, it will never be the full truth.
O'Brien continues with his war story and mentions the man he killed. His daughter first asked if that he had ever killed a man while at war. Thinking back to his days in Vietnam, O’Brien can remember the sight of the Vietcong man going along the trails late at night. Without a second thought, O’Brien threw a grenade, killing the man. O'Brien, just like in his story with Curt Lemon, does not leave out any details. The Vietcong man had “His jaw in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman’s, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of his skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that killed him,” (O’Brien 1990 p 124). The image he saw in the man was gruesome and real. But as O’Brien kept looking at the man’s face, he began making a life for this Vietcong member. O’Brien saw the man as a student and a soldier. Not a communist. He wanted to be a teacher some day and teach students mathematics. Though this part of the story is not true, O’Brien had made this part up to resemble the life he would have if he did not go to war. O’Brien saw that this Vietcong soldier had set out to kill O’Brien and his men and he knew that it was his life or the lives of O'Brien and his men. But all the while, O’Brien can’t help to feel as if it could've been him that was lying there, mangled and mutilated from the blast. As another war story that is not fully true, the death of the Vietcong lingers in O’Brien’s memories.
Larry Gwin was a man who fought in the Vietnam War in 1966. In Vietnam, Gwin saw men killing other men as he fought for his life. Day in and day out, Gwin and his men moved throughout the jungle looking for North Vietnamese. While under attack, Gwin searched for cover in a tree. But not long after spotting the tree was bits of bark flying off of it. Lying in the grass, Gwin had to think of the others in his platoon. Soon the Vietnamese came into sight and without a second thought Gwin ordered them to open fire, killing all of the Vietnamese. In Gwin’s words, “I remember those first men I ever killed, and I remember each one of them very distinctly. But if we hadn’t killed them, they would have killed us,” (Gwin 1998 p 396). Gwin and O’Brien faced similar events though Gwin claims to remember everything of this attack distinctly, he was telling about this experience in 1998. The event that he witnessed had been changed and altered throughout the years as he reflects on his time at war. Though it claims to be true, there is no definite answer proving that it is a true war story.
As O’Brien and his men traveled through Vietnam, they attacked small villages and towns that they had suspected were helping the Vietcong. After the raiding of one small village, O’Brien and his men found a young girl, about the age of 14 dancing violently outside her home. “The girl danced mostly on her toes. She took tiny steps in the dirt in front of her house, sometimes making a slow twirl, sometimes smiling to herself,” (O’Brien 1990 p 135). The movement of the young girl had symbolized her feeling and what she was going through. With the death of her family, her jagged, rough movements of her dancing expressed a feeling that not even O’Brien was really sure how to interpret. The girl couldn’t speak to them or tell them how she felt. All she could do was move around as her village burnt down and her family laid there dead. Her story was hard to tell and hard to understand what she was going though as war raged on.
The young girl’s movements in Vietnam were hard for O’Brien and his men to understand what she was feeling about the war. None of them could ask her how she felt or how to help. In Nguyen Hung’s story, it was an inside look of a Vietnamese person’s point of view. Hung was a boy when the war had started and was in college when he was drafted. Not looking forward to the war, he still reluctantly went and served for his country. He was much like the young girl in the way that he was separated from his family at a young age. He had to say out of the city and watch from afar as his neighborhoods were bombed. While in war, he had come to the conclusion that death was coming for him and it was coming at any moment. But while under attack, he had lived while his friends had died. “[Hung] had seen so much death and so many bombs that it had just taken everything out of [him]) (Hung 1998 p 400). Hung and the young girl from The Things They Carried were very much similar in the way that war had taken every last ounce of life they had left. The war was so intense and destructive that it had left them emotionless and unable to tell their full story.
In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien says right away that his story is not a true war story.

But he goes on telling the reader that many of his stories are true. Whether anyone will really know or not, a true war story is never the full truth. A veteran of war will leave out details and gruesome facts of their experience while fighting in war. They do it either to suppress certain memories or they genuinely forgot what really happened, their story is never the full version. O’Brien, Hung, and Gwin all witnessed war first hand in Vietnam. Each man had seen different things and had been in situations that required them to risk one life to save others. The war in Vietnam had forever changed these men. However, no one will ever truly believe their story as the true

story.