The issue of fiction versus nonfiction in The Things They Carried really bewildered me as I read the first few short stories. I spent a lot of the time worrying about what was real and what was "fake," trying to sort all of the details into these two categories. I especially got frustrated with the parts where O'Brien would say something like "this is true," or in reading the epigraph that says that these experiences are true.
After reading "How to Tell a True War Story," though, the blurry line between fiction and nonfiction in this situation began to make sense. I feel like the goal of these short stories is not to tell what happened or convey a message; it is to put the reader into the soldiers' shoes. If someone wanted a series of events about the Vietnam war, they could look in a history textbook, but it is easy to dismiss these facts as just things that happened. O'Brien wants us to see the war through the eyes of a soldier, though, so he has to stretch the truth or add some details or even make up events that never really happened so that we can get closer to knowing what their experience was.
It also made a lot more sense to me as to why the stories aren't supposed to have morals. If the goal of the stories are for us to spend a day in the life of a soldier in Vietnam, there is no real lesson to be learned. We can't learn from their mistakes or their actions because we don't know if any of them actually happened. This does not mean that there is no point in reading the stories, though. We can get a pretty good sense of what these soldiers felt and went through, and I think that that in itself conveys a pretty good lesson: it is important to try to put yourself in someone else's shoes and walk around in them. By doing this, it helps to become a more understanding person, and it might do some good for other people.
In this case, I think that by reading this book, we are sort of helping veterans of Vietnam: we are making these stories heard and providing an audience to understand what they went through, which is the trouble that Norman Bowker went through in Speaking of Courage. Similarly, in Fire and Forget, writing the war stories may have been a sort of therapeutic way for the authors to work through some of their trauma in Iraq and Afghanistan. By reading these stories, we are hearing something that the authors need to be heard. I don't mean to give us too much credit, though. I think that it is important for us to read these stories to realize how much we take for granted and acknowledge the terrible realities of war.
