Who is Bobby Jorgenson?
At this point in The Things They Carried , I think we're all pretty skeptical about what information being presented is factual or not. A lot of what is being written seems so true you can really feel the emotions, really see the story... and then O'Brien goes out and tells you that he made it all up. I suppose that is what he's explicitly told us he wanted to have happen. He wanted us to feel the way he felt, even if it wasn't the truth. Isn't that exactly what he tried to do to Bobby Jorgenson? In "The Ghost Soldiers", Tim wanted to take revenge on Jorgenson for failing to treat his bullet wound properly. At the top of page 184, the narrator (Tim) says, "I'd head down to the wire and stare out at the darkness, out where the war was, and think up ways to make Bobby Jorgenson feel exactly what I felt." Just as he was trying to make Jorgenson feel the way that he felt, the author has been trying to make readers feel what he felt. He makes Jorg...