The Things They Carried

The short stories made up to what is known as, "The Things They Carried", has captured my attention more than any of the previous novels. This one actually has some historical events and tells stories from the pas, whereas all the other books we have read have a kind of "demon like" reference from my views and i cannot relate to them at all. O'Brien begins to tell different stories he tries to portray why a soldier should be teling their stories. For instance, “And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed”. “In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling”. Everybody becomes so wrapped up in the adventure and how the stories can show a very positive outlook, they often can misinterpret what the author from the short story is trying to tell to his audience. The soldiers often want to persuade their readers to be happy and tell them the victories they had or the lives they have saved, however, it may be hard for them to get into depth for to the reality of war and how you witness death everyday and how you see your fellow soldiers fighting side by side dying. "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." This demonstrates how everyone is deceived by the war stories which we are told rather than seeing the reality of what goes on “behind enemy lines”. The end!