Jaime Bhattaryya

IB English II

Period 1

September 28, 2022

How does Tim O’Brien express a soldier's experience in a war?

“You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care

for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home

talking dirty.” (O’Brien66)

A true war story may not be the historical facts of what took place in a war. A true war story is the

emotions, thoughts, and feelings a soldier faces both at war and back at home. In the novel, The Things

They Carried, Tim O’Brien utilizes story and fictional truth through diction and imagery in order to

convey the true experience of war. Through the vignette “On the Rainy River”, Rat Kiley’s exaggeration,

and the horrifying violence towards the baby water buffalo, a true war experience is portrayed.

Tim O'Brien endures physical, psychological, and emotional pain as a result of his time in the

horrific Vietnam War. Although the majority of psychological and physical trauma occurs during a war, a

soldier's war experience and conflicts begin the moment they are drafted. In the vignette, “On The Rainy

River”, O'Brien expresses his true feelings and internal conflict through story truth and imagery, “My

whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever

wanted to be” (O'Brien 55). O'Brien utilized the river at the border to symbolize and correlate this

fictional story to how he felt internally when drafted. Despite his trip to the Canadian border being

completely fictional, the story's imagery allows the reader to truly understand the burden and shame he

felt. The idea of story truth and its importance in war stories is further developed through Rat Kiley’s

exaggeration and overstatement for experiences. Instead of using the facts, Rat exaggerates his story to

“heat up the truth and make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.”(O’Brian85). This
shows how insignificant the facts and truth are when telling a war story as it does not portray a soldier's

true experience. O'Brien shows a soldier's true experience through the brutal murder of a baby water

buffalo. After Curt Lemon’s death, Rat Kiley had lost his best friend. When the soldiers came across a

baby water buffalo, Rat “shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn't to kill; it was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle

up against the mouth and shot the mouth away”(O'Brien 75). To allow the reader to comprehend the

anguish and inhumane deeds involved in a war experience, the author uses horrific and descriptive

language toward a baby animal. Additionally, the gore demonstrates how merciless soldiers were in battle

as they were destroyed mentally from the death around them.

Throughout The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien expresses the real experience of war through

the imagery and diction of story-truth. Although the author goes around the facts with fictional stories like

the rainy river and baby water buffalo, he expresses a soldier's embarrassment and emotions that aren't

felt through facts. As a whole, O’Brien displays that the cold hard truth of war and the toll it has on

soldiers mentally can only be expressed through emotionally driven fictional stories.