Tim O'Brien

O'Brien was drafted in 1968 and served in Quang Ngai province with the same division responsible for what happened at My Lai a year before he arrived, in the same villages. The Things They Carried is fiction narrated by a character called Tim O'Brien, and it argues at length that an invented story can carry the truth of an event better than an accurate one, a distinction he calls story-truth and happening-truth. Going After Cacciato, about a soldier who decides to walk from Vietnam to Paris, won the National Book Award in 1979. He has said repeatedly that he is not writing about war so much as about memory and cowardice.