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In ‘The Things They Carried’, Tim O’Brien underlines the devastating effects of war and the lasting damage of death that a soldier may witness or experience. O’Brien employs a fragmentary and metafictional form of storytelling to highlight the theme of death and morality and explore the different perceptions of the actions of the war. O’Brien informs us that war isn’t always about the glory or the death of the soldiers, but instead, it is about beauty and friendship. A soldier's experience during the war can never be forgotten. As for O’Brien, he employs the concept of storytelling to help wash out the distressing images of war and subvert them into a rewarding memory. In ‘Spin’, O’Brien states that “he is forty-three years old now” and is continuing to write war stories about the soldiers and his friends. He remembers the moments of Curt Lemon’s death and the time when Lavender had taken tranquilizers. As O’Brien sits and remembers, he realizes that “the bad stuff never stops happening” and that it’s constantly “replaying itself over and over”, suggesting that sometimes memories of death can be so painful that they are impossible to forget. A part of O’Brien thinks that he should stop writing about war and even looks at his daughter's guiltless suggestion that he should ‘stop writing about war stories’ as a motive to forget the gruesome past and move on. But O’Brien attempts to bring the lives of the soldiers back, as his memories even have an entity of their own, and the soldiers who battled beside him who died, still exist in their way through memory and storytelling. In ‘How To Tell a True War Story’, after Curt Lemon's death, the Alpha Company found a baby buffalo in the woods.
Drowning in his sorrow and guilt, Rat Kiley picked up a gun and shot it. He “shot it at its ear” then “shot it at its knees” and continued to shoot it, but only in places where the “wounds wouldn’t be fatal”. O’Brien tries to justify the story by stating that “he had just lost his best friend” and tortured the buffalo as a way of coping. Back home, O’Brien would tell this story to old women and they could cry listening to it, but O’Brien says that they didn’t understand the meaning. War wasn’t only about the gore and death, but instead, it was about the beauty of it and the friendships that were created. There is a right and wrong way to tell a story and O’Brien even states that ‘if a story is moral, then don’t believe it’. But what he’s asking from the reader is for a sense of tenderness and nostalgia, because not only is there a right and wrong way to write stories, but there is also a right and wrong way to listen to them. In ‘The Man I Killed’, O’Brien stands in front of a young man that he had just killed in My Khe. He continually repeats the same details about the man.
He states that “one eye is a star-shaped hole” and has “arched eyebrows like a woman” O’Brien makes up a whole backstory of the life of the soldier to dilute his guilt for killing the man. The structure of the story employs a confession form, where O’Brien forces himself to look at the dead body as a way of punishment and writes a story about him as a continuum. The story concludes with a one-sided conversation between Kiowa and O’Brien. Kiowa tries to talk to O’Brien but he remains silent. The discussion paints the restrictions of friendship and that no amount of companionship can make up for the reality of death, and the moral consequence of O’Brien’s deed. As a result, O’Brien utilizes the theme of death and morality to further explore the importance of remembering and overcoming one's guilt within the war. He highlights aspects of truth in storytelling and ultimately concludes that it is not how you tell a story, but rather how it is perceived by the reader. He underlines that death can never leave a soldier's mind, but you can choose whether to remember the gore and darkness of it or the bravery and friendship.
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