Fiction vs Truth

I think O'Brien was telling the truth, not literally or as straight forward as most people would expect. The book is fiction and there is no way to tell which stories were actual events and which were made up. What matters is the book tells the truth about life lessons and emotions. Its like fairy tales. They are made up and in a dream world but the lessons in them are of human nature and truth. A factual novel would have been less interesting and wouldn't express the ideas and evoke the emotions as well as a stretch of the truth did. O'Brien wrote "The Things They Carried" in a way that would touch all its readers in different ways.