A series of interconnected tales, some autobiographical and some fictional, The Things They Carried probes the same scars as Cacciato , but less obliquely. The book also amplified O'Brien's interest in deconstructing not only the stories we tell about Vietnam, but how and why we tell them. In one passage, for example, he analyzes the archetypal story about the soldier who jumps on a live grenade to save his comrades' lives. According to O'Brien, the veracity of such a story is beside the point. Without the grounding reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue.
Absolute occurrence is irrelevant.
O'Brien had actually begun writing another book earlier than The Things They Carried , a novel centering around a Vietnam vet tormented by the ghosts of Vietnam whose wife one day up and vanishes. The book that would eventually become In the Lake of the Woods , however, would take several more years of mental wrestling before O'Brien could return to it and finish. I knew some reviewers wouldn't like the idea of leaving the mystery unsolved at the end, so I figured I'd try to change it around sometime later. But then I realized that this is just what had to be. Epistemologically, the author's story holds the same relation to truth as, say, Don DeLillo's hypothetical vision of the Kennedy assassination in Libra or any journalist's take on the O.J. Simpson murder case.