This paper discusses how the face of
war has never appeared so grim as it does in Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried".
It looks at how, in a collection of short stories, O'Brien demonstrates how the
soldiers cope with the dangerous situations they encounter in Vietnam and how O'Brien discovered his way of coping with the
war was telling stories. It examines his mechanism of storytelling and explores how his grotesque and violent scenes to convey the message that war is hell.