The Things They Carried was full of war stories, each one telling a telling a different kind of truth. The author Tim O"Brien refers to two different kinds of truth. The first he calls the story-truth. He says "I want you to know why the story-truth is truer sometimes than the happening-truth." (Pg.179) Telling the happening-truth sometimes doesn't get the point across. The story-truth puts different images into you head that are made up to make you feel exactly what that person was going through. Telling the happening-truth is just going through the motions and most of the time just telling the actual story doesn't make you understand what that person was feeling at that moment. The story-truth will make up details that never happened to make you appreciate the situation they were in. .
The story about Mary Anne Bell was a perfect story-truth example. The author tells the story of a woman going to Vietnam to be their with her boyfriend and she winds up turning into a killer working with the special operations group called the green berets. What was so hard to believe about this story was that it was a woman. Had it been a man the story would have been totally believable and no questions would have been asked. However the author uses a woman as he tells the story-truth which makes you get a better sense of what Vietnam actually did to people while they fought there. It took a sweet young girl fresh out of high school and turned her into a killing machine. Vietnam did this to her as .
well as thousands of other young men her age. The atmosphere brainwashed her just like it did the other kids fighting in the war. .
The author portray's Mary Anne Bell as a sweet innocent young woman when she arrives. By the end of the story Mary Anne had transformed into something totally different. "It took a few seconds, Rat said, to appreciate the full change. It part it was her eyes: utterly flat and indifferent.