SOURCE: Volkmer, Jon. “Telling the ‘Truth’ about Vietnam: Episteme and Narrative Structure in The Green Berets and The Things They Carried.” WLA: War, Literature & the Arts 11, no. 1 (spring-summer 1999): 240-55.

In the following essay, Volkmer compares and contrasts The Things They Carried and Robin Moore's The Green Berets, focusing on the way both authors treat the truth about the Vietnam War.

Robin Moore's The Green Berets, published in 1965, is one of the earliest novels of the Vietnam conflict. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990), is one of the more recent. Nevertheless, there are many similarities: both are novels-in-short-stories; both focus on American soldiers; both employ mainly jungle settings; and both feature a first-person narrator who is both one-of-the-guys AND separated from them by the status of being a writer. Moreover, each book makes an explicit claim that it tells the “truth” about the Vietnam conflict, a truth which each...