Spencer Sims, Outside Reading 5, The Things They Carried by Tim O' Brien

"The Things They Carried" is a series of stories that Tim O' Brien and his fellow soldiers experience during their service in Vietnam, or so he initially leads you to believe. While he did serve in Vietnam he admits most of the events found in the book did not actually occur, though the experience he describes did happen to those soldiers. This off right seems to be a paradox of sorts but in actuality he has created a myth much like the ones we've discussed in class. To truly encompass the facts of humanity the soldier must consider, the very facts he found himself facing, he creates a narrative to draw out ones empathy and allows the audience to share in the emotional highs and lows of the characters in a story like fashion. I recall one short story in the book, where one of O'Brien's friends spends his entire day driving around a lake, he he finds himself contemplating how to tell his parents he almost won a medal. As we soon to find out, the events that warranted the medal in his eyes was when his platoon was pinned by incoming mortar fire while traversing what they only later realized was the villages refuse gulch. one of his comrades had begun to drown in the excrement, and he couldn't save them because he was too frightened. When honorably discharged he spends the rest of his days attempting to reconcile this event by rationalizing it all the while driving around that lake. In the end he kills himself. The author even directly addresses that he can neither confirm nor deny the trueness of the events, but in no way does that diminish it's truth value. It was not just a moral of a story, by encapsulating something more of humanity the author has brought reality into a story.