In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” an emphasis is placed on what we know as “truth.”  Is it important that a war story told by a Veteran should be completely accurate from a third-person perspective, or is each soldier’s actual experience, feelings, trauma, and pain more important? What makes a war story “true” is how that story was experienced by each soldier, and the way that each soldier is individually treated and is what is most important to our understanding of war and its consequences.  Many writers, such as Tim O’Brien, told these stories as their own form of not only therapy, but as dissent against the war.  The political motivations of these essays, stories and poems have been overshadowed by therapeutic analysis, and rather than being looked upon as true stories which demonstrate the horrors of the Vietnam War, these pieces have been brushed off as your typical crazy and over exaggerated Vietnam vet stories.

“By emphasizing the individual process of overcoming “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” the critical work analyzing the production of these authors has, intentionally or not, obscured the larger political project by which these writers were literally putting their bodies on the line,” (Risquez).  Sound mental health, of course, is important not only to each soldier, but to his family and the rest of his or her community, but by deeming every soldier as a mental patient, novelists such as Tim O’Brien can easily be put into a different class of writer – the crazy war veteran writer – and his stories therefore hold less significance as a form of legitimate political speech.  Risquez, in “Dissent as Therapy,” gives the example of Walter in the Coen Brothers’ film, The Big Lebowski.   In one scene at a family diner, “Walter, the Vietnam veteran, loud and aggressive, prone to thoughtless violence and the Dude, a West Coast countercultural slacker, have become an ironic reference to the cultural and social turmoil of the Vietnam era…and the fact that the scene closes with the Dude standing up and leaving Walter behind re-stages what is a pervasive trope in the representation of the social conflict generated by the war: the rejection and neglect of the veterans by the pacifists and war protesters, who accused them of committing the most horrible crimes, and, in turn, the fact that the vets despised the pacifists for not having lived through the life-changing firsthand experience of war and, as a consequence, for not being able to understand them or their outlook on reality,” (Risquez).  The attitude towards veterans shown humorously in the film reflects America’s view towards them and 
