SOURCE: Kaplan, Steven. “The Things They Carried.” In Understanding Tim O'Brien, pp. 169-92. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Kaplan contends that in The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien “emphasizes the magical powers of storytelling,” incorporating both factual writing and memoir to create fiction that is “truer than fact.”

Before America became militarily involved in defending the sovereignty of South Vietnam, it had to, as one historian recently put it, “invent” the country and the political issues at stake there.¹ The Vietnam War was in many ways a wild and terrible work of fiction written by some dangerous and macabre storytellers. First, America decided for Vietnam what constituted good and evil, right and wrong, civilized and uncivilized, freedom and oppression according to American standards; then, the United States military traveled the long physical distance to Vietnam and attempted to make America's notions about these...