Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

The Things They Carried is a fictional account of the nature of men during the Vietnam War. The power of the novel comes from the blurring of the line between fiction and non-fiction. O’Brien used his actual memoir as a Vietnam soldier with a collection of what appears to be fictional short stories that he attributed to the members of his platoon. This style of writing shows that sometimes a person 's subjective thoughts and feelings about an event, which O 'Brien calls story-truth, is more meaningful than an objective factual account of the events, which O 'Brien calls happening-truth.
O 'Brien blurs the line between fact and fiction right from the start when O 'Brien dedicates the novel to the individual soldiers in his platoon, which the …show more content…
Many draftees did not even agree with the war and were drafted into the conflict and forced to fight. The doubt about the merit of the Vietnam War was brought out in a flash back before Tim O 'Brien served in Vietnam. In the chapter "On the Rainy River," O 'Brien talks about the time when he contemplated whether he should escape military service by fleeing to Canada. The issue of dodging the draft was a big issue that was discussed on college campuses and in the news. O 'Brien was conflicted by this. He said, "It was a moral split. I couldn 't make up my mind. I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile. I was afraid of walking away from my own life, my friends and my family, my whole history, everything that mattered to me. I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law. I feared ridicule and censure." O 'Brien went to great lengths to explain to the readers all sides of the predicament. One of the most insightful observations was why O 'Brien did not just refuse to fight. Even though he was scared and terrified of the situation, why didn 't he just quit. One might expect he did not quit because of the standards of responsibility, honor, bravery, patriotism, or heroism. But that was not the reason. It was because of cowardice and expectation of society. He was too frightened to be a …show more content…
The average age of a soldier in O 'Brien 's platoon was nineteen or twenty. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Cross, was twenty-four. O 'Brien shows the reader that the platoon carried their immaturity by telling the story about a conversion between Mitchell Sanders and Henry Dobbins. When something bad happened, Sanders would say there was a moral to it. But it was obvious that when Sanders said "You know. Moral," that he did not know what the word moral really meant. All he suspected was that "moral" was something important. The chapter "The Ghost Soldiers," Tim O 'Brien discusses two times when he was shot. During the second time, he was treated by a new medic Bobby Jorgenson. Tim O 'Brien describes Jorgenson "green and incompetent and scared. So when I got shot the second time, in the butt, along the Song Tra Bong, it took the son of a bitch almost ten minutes to work up the nerve to crawl over to me. By then I was gone with the pain. Later I found out I 'd almost died of shock," which Tim O 'Brien could not forgive. To get back at Jorgenson, Tim O 'Brien pulled a prank, by staging a fake Vietcong attack. Jorgenson punched Tim O 'Brien and they called it even. Tim O 'Brien and Jorgenson settled their differences like boys in high school, not what the reader might expect from soldiers during a war, but hinted again at the adolescent age of most of