The novel The Thing They Carried is a collection of short stories that share underlying themes and characters. One of the stories is titled “How to Tell a True War Story.” In this story the narrator delves into the central theme of the distinction between truth and fiction when writing a war story. The story, like most of the other stories in the novel, jumps irregularly between events, which often creates confusion and a sense of the surreal in the story. Throughout the story the narrator repeatedly shows that when writing a war story "the truth of the story is sometimes truer than the truth that happens." (O'Brien pg. 171). This quote encapsulates the theme and supports it. The narrator's use of stylistic devices paired with stories such as "How to Tell a True War Story" and "Good Form" exemplify how fiction can fully represent the truth while facts are miserably short. The narrator tells the story of how Curt Lemon dies to support his claim that "it is difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen." (O'Brien pg. 68) When Curt Lemon dies, the narrator uses vivid imagery to describe the scene as "almost beautiful": "...the way the sunlight enveloped him and lifted him up and sucked him into high in a tree full of moss, vines and white flowers” ​​(O’Brien pg. 67) The imagery and personification in the story makes it seem surreal. However, the narrator explains that when someone dies, people only see fragments of the whole picture, as evidenced by when the narrator reports, "you look away, then you look back for a moment, and then you look away again" (O' Brien pg 67). Because of this, what actually happens becomes “fuzzy” and influences the stories told by the soldiers, making them seem false. This... half of the paper... contains a true story, which tells the truth about sensations and emotions. This is represented when the narrator says “it makes the story seem false, but it actually represents the hard and exact truth” (O'Brien pg. 68). O'Brien shows that it doesn't matter whether a story is fiction, as long as it represents the truth as it seemed. The novel The Thing They Carried is a collection of short stories that explores the theme of the distinction between factual truth and historical truth. . The quote in the story “How To Tell a True War Story” distinguishes between what is true in a war story and what is not. This quote, through the use of figurative language, imagery, and other stylistic devices, causes the reader to reconsider the meaning of truth in a war story. The quote summarizes a central idea of ​​the short story collection and gives meaning to the events of the book.