This foolishness becomes emblematic of the entire Vietnam experience -- situations are created to display violence and bravery that have tremendous significance to the soldiers, but serve no real purpose. Just as Rat mythologizes Kurt's willingness to face death, and uses the body of an animal to vent his fury as a kind of sacrifice, Kurt himself tried to live up to a foolish ideal of what it meant to be a solider.
The lies, or the myths and symbols these individuals created about themselves almost have a stronger force than the truth. Rat believes really angry with Kurt's sister, not the war. Tim suggests that Rat is angry with Kurt's sister because she refused to believe Rat's version of her brother's character, not about how he died. At the end of the novel, Rat attempts to recapitulate Kurt's violence against himself with his tooth by blowing off his own foot with a gun, as if he wants a share of his friend's glory.
However, even this telling and the retellings of the stories about Rat and Kurt's self-maiming and furies are lies. Tim admits to the reader that like his fictional creation Rat, he is unable to tell civilians like his daughter the full truth of what transpired in Vietnam. Rat's anger against Kurt's civilian sister is really emblematic of Tim's own frustration and being unable to tell the story of the war, even though he is a writer. Tim is a fiction writer, and a writer tells tales. But although he actually fought in Vietnam, he still writes fiction, and cannot write purely as a soldier, but must be a storyteller, even of his own personal experience....
Tim admits he attributes stories to himself, like throwing a grenade at a Vietnamese man, that others committed, and stories that are true about his own experience he formulates into the lives of others. He does this because "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth." (179) In other words, sometimes a myth can convey truth more vividly than a biography or a real history.
Tim thus has a contradictory view of the value of myths about war. On one hand, The Things They Carried is a novel about Vietnam of power. It conveys an emotional, although not a literal truth about the Vietnam experience for the reader. But on the other hand, the reader leaves the book feeling somewhat unsatisfied, as it seems the author is implying that the rationale for the Vietnam War was based on the lies of American goodness, truth, freedom, and manhood. Characters are shown engaging in foolish acts of self-myth-telling like Kurt and Rat, that show the ridiculousness of being a brave man in the midst of an immoral jungle of people who do not understand why the Americans are there or what the Americans are fighting for and against. Ultimately, the novel, a work of fiction, makes the reader uncomfortable about reading about the Vietnam experience in fiction, even though it feels as though it is conveying a powerful truth about the experience of soldiers who cannot communicate their experiences, other than through violence and lies.
Works Cited
O'Brien Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1999.
