By: Brandy Bigler

A Fact is something that actually exists or is known through experience to be true.

Fiction is something Feigned, invented or imagined.

It is, however, much easier to label a story as fiction as opposed to fact. O’Brien decided that he did not want to risk lying to himself and the rest of the world. As a result, he determined that there was more truth in calling his stories fiction than there was in trying to label them as true.

There are not many legitimately true stories. Even stories that are proclaimed to be completely truthful are likely to have some small detail that has been accidently changed due to a lapse in memory or maybe some small outside influence. O’Brien does not by any means label The Things They Carried as a true story, but he does let it be known that some portion of the book was likely written from truth by accident. He may have also written some of it with the intention of describing true events. However, his philosophy is that a completely true story is very hard to come by because of two possible factors. Either it is impossible to recall every detail correctly, or other individuals who may have shared the experience may not recall it in exactly the same way. O’Brien experienced many rare moments that only war can provide, but so did his fellow soldiers. It seems that there is no real way to determine fact from fiction in O’Brien’s stories.