Coffee and Frosted Flakes

            Tim O' Brien struggles to grasp what "actually happened" in every war story he reveals in this chapter. Although The Things They Carried is fiction, Tim attempts to make the reader understand how difficult it was to cope with the events that his platoon members experienced throughout war. By doing so, Tim reveals certain psychological effects of PTSD. Even within the first page of the chapter, the reader doesn’t feel empathy for Lemon, but for Bob Kiley, Lemon’s good friend who wrote an honest and heart felt letter to Lemon’s sister regarding his death and the magnitude of their friendship. After explaining in depth how terrific the letter was, Tim goes on to explain what a true war story is. This theme comes up quite a lot in this chapter, and Tim’s vulnerability is exposed through his repetition, contradiction and bitterness towards the subject.

            Tim jumps around the events the lead up to Lemon’s death. After talking about how him and Kiley were having fun and messing around he ends the paragraph with “It’s all exactly true.” Right before he gets to Lemon’s death he writes, “It’s hard to tell what happened next.” The reader can almost feel a limitation in Tim’s flashbacks that surround Lemon’s death. He goes on to tell the reader how hard it is to separate what happened and what actually happened in any war story. This paragraph is quite contradictive. Again Tim does an excellent job at making the reader “feel.” This time it’s the anxiety and emotional ups and downs a war story can make you feel, and how close to the truth they can get, simply because the non-believable parts are honest and the story teller has to make up the believable sections.

After Sander’s story about his platoon going into the mountains, Tim dives into what the moral of a war story should be, if any. You can’t extract a meaning without unraveling a deeper meaning, he says. However, a sentence later he claims “There’s nothing much to say about a true war story.” “A True war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.”