Truths And Real Truth In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

The difference between Tim O'Brien's story truths and real truths is that the story truth is figurative and makes the reader feel the emotions that he felt, while the real truth is literal and makes the reader understand what actually happened. Tim O’Brien’s most thought-provoking statement is one where he creates a paradox of sorts to let the reader decide whether he may be a coward or not. The TED Talks explain why veterans miss the war and why it’s difficult to adjust from war, which connects to The Things They Carried because there are stories about people who miss the war and people who couldn’t adjust to the war.
Within the book, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien tells what happened figuratively, the story truth, and what happened
“I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war” (O’Brien, 58). He didn’t want to go to the war when he first got the draft notice, he even thought about running away to Canada in order to get out of it. He calls himself a coward because he went into the war. He went into the war because he was afraid of what everyone would say about him if he were to run away. “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.” (O’Brien, 42) He was afraid to kill people because he was brought up in a richer family, and he didn’t even know how to hold a gun. He thought that he was too good for the war and he didn’t want to die, but he decided that between losing the good opinion of others and fighting in a war, that fighting in a war was the lesser of the
In the first one, “Our Lonely Society Makes It Hard to Come Home From War”, Sebastian Junger explains why it’s difficult to adjust from war. “The Israeli military has a PTSD rate of around one percent. The theory is that everyone in Israel is supposed to serve in the military. When soldiers come back from the front line, they’re not going from a military environment to a civilian environment. They’re coming back to a community where everyone understands about the military” (1Junger). The Israelis understand what everyone is going through because they have gone through war themselves, so they are more close-knit, as opposed to Americans, who go from military environment to a civilian environment. In the other TED Talks, “Why Veterans Miss War”, Sebastian Junger explains the reasons why veterans will usually re-enlist in the war and why they miss it. “Not knowing who they can count on, not knowing who loves them, who they can love, not knowing exactly what anyone they know would do for them if it came down to it. That is terrifying. Compared to that - psychologically, in some ways — war is easy compared to that kind of alienation”(2Junger). Veterans felt safer when they were in the war because they had become a part of a brotherhood that knew that they could depend on each other, as opposed to being outside of the war