SOURCE: Timmerman, John H. “Tim O'Brien and the Art of the True War Story: ‘Night March’ and ‘Speaking of Courage’.” Twentieth Century Literature 46, no. 1 (spring 2000): 100-14.

In the following essay, Timmerman compares the conflict between the reality of war and normal life as portrayed in “Night March” and “Speaking of Courage,” which appear in The Things They Carried.

The Vietnam war story is not simply about the rise and fall of nations (South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, China, Thailand, the United States, the Soviet Union). Rather, it is about the rise and fall of the dreams of individual soldiers—their hopes riddled by disillusionment, their fantasies broken by shrapnel-edged realities. In his Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War, Don Rignalda observes that Washington engaged in the war as a clinical and statistical commodity: “We imposed a carpentered reality on a country (South Vietnam) that wasn't a country at...