Well I really haven’t given this subject much thought but im gonna base themes off of the topics we discussed in class, such as Andreas concept of truth and lies or loneliness and the common role it plays in the stories we’ve read thus far. So I think by giving the narrator his own name and naming the rest of his characters after the men he actually fought alongside in the Vietnam War, O’Brien blurs the distinction between fact and fiction, which makes it impossible to know whether or not any given event in the stories truly happened to O’Brien. It’s like O’Brien intentionally heightens this impossibility when his characters contradict themselves several times in the collection of stories, rendering the truth of any statement suspect. O’Brien’s aim in blending fact and fiction is to make the point that objective truth of a war story is less relevant than the act of telling a story. He is attempting not to write a history of the Vietnam War through his stories but rather to explore the ways that speaking about war experience establishes or fails to establish bonds between a soldier and his audience. The technical facts surrounding any individual event are less important than the overarching, subjective truth of what the war meant to soldiers and how it changed them. Also another theme is that O’Brien argues that in Vietnam, loneliness and isolation are forces as destructive as any piece of ammunition. For instance, he repeatedly emphasizes the impact of solitude on the soldiers. He shows that thoughts, worries, and fears are as dangerous…if not more dangerous, than the Vietnamese soldiers themselves. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Mitchell Sanders’s story concerning soldiers made so paranoid by their experience on listening patrol that they hear strange noises emphasizing how the imagination can take over instantly in the lonely silence.