The Things They're Talking about

The Things they carried is, for lack of a better designation, is a war story. Not the traditional kind where every brave loyalist is a hero and every cowardly foreigner is a bloodthirsty enemy just waiting to be vanquished by the Patriotic and Just warrior. “On occasion the war is like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put a fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.” (pg. 32)No, these soldiers are human. And because they are human and this story is portrayed as a true war story, any story told will have a lack of the warm fuzzy morals that we have come to expect from war stories. "If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie." Chapter 6, pg. 68. Ultimately we are not supposed to gleam any sort of meaning from Tim O’Brien’s stories, but we are supposed to find the lack of meaning in them. The collections of stories seem more like an episodic, fractured, diary. There is no continuous plots or consistent timeline (like when they talk about who will die later). "It's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true." Chapter 7, pg. 82. The truth is found in the emotions, not in the accuracy of the facts. There is no way for anyone who has not been in a war situation to understand the plain facts, when what truly happens is so far out of our normal reality. So, in order to complete our understanding, the reality needs to be augmented in a way that it is exempt from the influences of all those Heroic war stories and history books to broken down to the pure emotions.