The Things They Carried is written by Tim O’Brien. This book is about the stories of Vietnam soldiers. Specifically, this essay will take from the stories of Tim O’Brien and Jimmy Cross. Tim O’Brien, the author of this story, is a Vietnam veteran. When he wrote this, he based it on his experiences but he used a technique called verisimilitude, which is the blurring of reality and fiction, so it is difficult at times to tell what is true and what is not. So, the question is, how does The Things They Carried relate to reality? One way to find out what is real and fake or fiction is to analyze O’Brien’s use of verisimilitude. The best way to do that is to compare the story with other similar works that used the same technique. Now to truly tell how close to reality it is, it should also be compared to the real experiences, thoughts, and feelings of actual veterans other than O’Brien.

Verisimilitude can be defined as the appearance of being true or real. As a writing technique it is the act of making a fictitious piece seem real or blurring the lines of the truth and the false. The specific way O’Brien does this in The Things They Carried can be compared with a few other works by different authors that use the technique in a similar way. Examples of these similar works would be Slaughterhouse-Five and The Enormous Room. Using this comparison, made in an article by Alex Vernon, it can be clearly understood what precisely is true and/or false. In both of these works there is a main character that matches the author of the piece just like O’Brien. This shows us that the authors definitely drew from their own experiences while writing their own respective books. All their descriptions match what they are likely to have encountered or have known about. There is also a similarity between how the all works start off, but this differs for the two examples. O’Brien’s work and Slaughterhouse-Five both start off with a few lines that sound very much akin to one another. But early in both “the Enormous Room” and O’Brien’s text the authors’ characters are visiting a war buddy and start to reminisce. Using this in conjunction with the similarity of the way the works tell their stories, “All three novels also tell their stories recursively, more-or-less following a storyline but doing so in a non-continuous, episodic, and fragmented manner” (Vernon). Gives the feeling of being told a story by someone who may be embellishing, down-playing, and/or not talking about somethings. 

The Vietnam war was one of the worst wars in American history from the fighting using guerrilla tactics all the way to the protests back home. It left far more than physical scars on our soldiers. This can be seen in Sarah Haley’s “When a Patient Reports Atrocities…”, an article meant to help psychologists understand and help Vietnam veterans. The way Haley does this is by providing examples of cases of true Vietnam veterans and in these cases the veterans give their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Using these cases, it can be found just how accurate The Things They Carried is to the true-to-life real thing by comparing them to the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of its characters. The first case is of a veteran called John who felt extreme guilt after getting to know a group of prisoners and bonding with them, and he refused an order to kill them but could do nothing while he watched as his fellow soldiers carried out the order themselves (Haley 3). This case is similar to lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s story in The Things They Carried. While Jimmy and his squad were out clearing a hole, Jimmy was a bit distracted thinking of his female pen-pal, letting one of his men go off to pee and on the man’s way back he was shot dead. Jimmy blamed himself for his death because he was the dead man’s lieutenant. That made it his responsibility and because he should not have been so distracted. These cases are alike because they respond to similar trauma in almost the exact same way. Both John and Jimmy blame themselves for what happened and their inaction to stop it, even though they themselves were not directly involved. This was also a wakeup call for both men; John realized that some of his previous actions as a soldier were wrong, and for Jimmy this led to him giving up on his pen-pal to solely focus on being a leader.

The second case is a case of the absence of guilt; it’s about a soldier named Bob. One day Bob and his squad went through a peaceful village and camped out not far past it for the night, however in the morning as one of the squad members went to leave the campsite he was killed and the entire camp was booby-trapped. So, the rest of the squad and Bob went back and destroyed the so-called peaceful village (Haley 3). This is almost exactly how Lieutenant Cross reacts as well, the day after his dead soldier’s body was picked up. Jimmy Cross gave up on his pen-pal to be a better leader and he “led his men into the village of Than Khe. They burned everything. They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they called in artillery, and watched the wreckage” (O’Brien 336). Both of these soldiers and their squad unexpectedly lost a comrade and without mercy or guilt, even later in life, destroyed a village they deemed responsible even though it could have possibly been innocent of the crime.

These two cases show that O’Brien really brought the true experiences of the war and its soldiers into his work. He accurately displayed the thoughts and experiences of the soldiers without even knowing these instances personally. Both Bob and Jimmy only thought of revenge after the loss of a comrade and betrayal of the Vietnamese. They did not regret this morally questionable action as they saw it as their right or only way of survival. However, both John and Jimmy could only feel remorse and guilt at the loss of their friends. They blamed themselves for something they did not do and regretted many of their past actions which led to each one changing their ways forever. In, The Things They Carried, the truth can be found in the accurately portrayed thoughts, actions, experiences, and feelings of the characters, where they become reality.

The Things They Carried is a powerful piece that walks the line of fiction and non-fiction with every line. The way it blurs the line of reality and fiction or verisimilitude gives a feeling of a story being told that shows where things could be overexaggerated, down-played, or, in other words, fictionalized. One of the instances of this is the time when it talks about the author-character goes to visit Jimmy Cross. It toes the line of reality by giving true-to-life tales of that express the real thoughts, feelings, and experiences of real Vietnam veterans. This is how The Things They Carried relates to reality: it conveys reality using fictional elements.    
