Reaction to "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien
In The Things They Carried, Tim O 'Brien uses a variety of stories to explain the life experiences that he and many of his fellow soldiers endured during a single year in Vietnam. He tells these stories in a way that we can connect to these experiences. We never spent time in Vietnam, but O 'Brien wants us to feel like we were there. O 'Brien uses what he calls "story-truth" to write these stories. The outcome or the people may be different but the feeling is real; that 's the truth in the story, the feeling. He wants us to feel what he felt, see what he saw. He doesn 't just tell us what was happening exactly; he tells a fictional story that conveys the same emotion. He plays with the truth, that 's the reason why this book is a work of fiction. The stories may not be real but they are based on what the soldiers were feeling during that year in Vietnam. This playing around with the truth is what makes the soldiers skeptical of what is true and what isn 't. They see things differently as they are happening. They know what is happening at that point in time but their mind sees it in a different lighting. O 'Brien tells a story about a fellow soldier killed by a land mine. His name was Curt Lemon. He and another soldier were playing catch with a smoke grenade and Lemon takes a half step too far and steps on the land mine. However, that 's not how O 'Brien sees it. He sees Lemon step out from the dark tree canopy and into the sunlight. The sunlight seems to carry him up into the tree and he disappears. O 'Brien calls it beautiful. There 's nothing beautiful about a man being killed but that 's how he saw it. That 's how his mind saw it. During the war a soldier can get so used to death and killing. Maybe by just seeing it happen so often that they start to critique it and see the beauty in it. This is what the soldiers see then in that moment but when they go back and retrieve that memory they don 't know what is true and what isn 't true. The war has affected