Blurred Histories or Half-Truths in 'the Things They Carried'

Blurred Histories or Half-Truths in The Things They Carried?

By the end of April in 1975, over fifty-eight thousand American soldiers had been killed in the Vietnam War. There were also more than one hundred and fifty-three thousand wounded in the conflict. This left an opening for a telling of the stories that came out of the time period leaving so many affected…both soldiers and the families who needed to understand what had happened to their boys in that country half a world away. In the 1970’s there was a rash of interest that carried over into the 1980’s for people trying to understand what had gone on in Vietnam. Many of those that had gone off to war and returned home alive were irreversibly changed. In the days of our country before we classified post traumatic stress disorder, soldiers had returned home, seemingly in the same body that the young men left in, but strangely different. This only fueled the public’s desire to know what had happened in the jungles of Vietnam that had changed these kids so. One American soldier that was lucky enough to return home, decorated with a Purple Heart, was Tim O’Brien. Twenty years after returning home, his novel The Things They Carried was published, nearly at the end of the Vietnam craze. The work served as a sort of therapeutic service to O’Brien’s spirit, but has also resonated with readers. Ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus is credited for saying, “In war, truth is the first casualty.” O’Brien seemed to realize this when he crafted the novel, as the work often shows minimal differences between the true events of Vietnam and the stories outlined within the pages of his novel. O’Brien even comments on this very point in the novel, as he observes, “To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true” (45).

Upon opening the novel, the reader notices that the work is claimed to be a work of fiction. However the reader is immediately...