In the very same chapter, Tim O’Brien says, “Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness”. O’Brien re-emphasizes this idea in “Good Form” where he differentiates between a “story truth” and a “happening truth”. O’Brien states the “happening truth” as, “I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief. Though this true description, or as O’Brien likes to say, “normal stuff”, we are left with an unrevealed description without much meaning and emotion which don’t contribute to the true sense of the war. On the other hand, the “story truth” is stated as follows, “He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut; the other eye was a stars-shaped hole. I killed him.” Not only is this description absolutely fabricated- but in the true sense of the word, crazy. However, he successfully demonstrates the brutal atrocities in the war to the reader.
Tim O’Brien tries to reach truth by fiction through one of the characters in the book, Henry Dobbins. The chapter “Stockings” is dedicated to Dobbins’s talisman, his girlfriend’s stockings which he wraps around his neck. “Like many of us in Vietnam, Dobbins felt the pull of superstition and believed firmly and absolutely in the power of the stockings”. Here, O’Brien tries to express that Truth resides in fiction, not in fact which is a major theme of the novel, re-emphasizing his numerous justifications in “How to Tell a True war story”. Very concise chapters like “Stockings” and “The Dentist” are short stories which make a microcosm into a microcosm where each large effect of the Vietnam War on American soldiers is told in one effective story, which greatly contributes to the realism to the story by giving the reader a wider angle of the war’s effects on American men.
Even though the author refers to another “Tim O’Brien” in “The Things They Carried” and characters of the alpha company don’t exist Credibility of the story is achieved by telling the story from different points of view. The first person major used in ‘On the Rainy River’ makes the story very intimate and therefore believable. He starts off by saying: “This is one story I’ve never told before” immediately the reader is engaged. It is as if Tim O’Brien were an old friend, who told the reader a secret nobody knows of. Throughout the chapter he repeats “I remember” or “I don’t remember” which adds to the secretive and intimate tone. In other chapters there are different points of view. In the chapter ‘In the Field’ Tim O’Brien uses third person point of view so he can describe actions, and what several characters are thinking. He describes Kiowa’s death from four different points of view. The artistic intention of this is similar to the use of telling the same story several times. The circular structure created by the different points of views makes the reader think about which elements from which story are true. In ‘In the Field’ Jimmy Cross and a young unnamed soldier blame themselves for the death of Kiowa. O’Brien leaves it up to the reader to decide whose fault it really was. He does not give the reader the answer. The different points of views show different sides of the same story, so the reader can feel what each character is feeling.
Details are used to make the story more believable and easier to imagine. Curt Lemon’s death seems impossible the way O’Brien describes it: “the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree”. The other details though, make it easier to imagine, and even the impossibility of Curt Lemon being lifted into the tree seems possible. “His face was suddenly brown and shining. A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful . . . a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms.” The reader can see Curt Lemon, the reader can imagine what he had looked like, and can even see him getting sucked into the tree by the sunlight.
Colloquial language is another form of detail to make the stories more truthful. The use of words like “dust-off chopper”, which would be used in regular speech by the soldiers, the swearing also adds to the believability of the story. Everything seems possible. If the soldiers would use words like, the army truck that comes to pick up the casualties instead of the ‘dust-off chopper’ it would not be as truthful. “To carry something was to hump it” the word hump is then always used instead of carrying. The use of military slang adds to the truth; it makes the reader feel as if he were part of it, as if he knew everything the soldiers did.
Even though the author refers to another “Tim O’Brien” in “The Things They Carried” and characters of the alpha company don’t exist, By repeating the same story with different details, and different points of views and by adding detail and colloquial language, Tim O’Brien successfully wrote and intimate war story. This story could be true, although the characters and details are fictional. The feelings evoked by each story are true, and similar to the ones he himself felt while he was in Vietnam fighting the war.
