On page 68, O'Brien tells us that his stories don't tell the exact truth, but rather "the hard and exact truth as it seemed." This confused me for a bit. How can he tell us a war story if most of it is just made up? But I think I answered my question. He isn't telling the stories for the sake of informing us on the happenings of the war. He is telling the stories for the sake of illustrating the effects of the war. It doesn't matter to him how Curt Lemon died; what matters is that the reader understands the effect that his death had on the soldiers around him. He describes the different reactions to his death and how people dealt with it differently. These were the facts that mattered.
He also did this stories to paint the reader a picture. He describes a grotesque image of a dead man not so that the reader knows which eyeball he lost, but so the reader understands the types of horrors experienced in the Vietnam War. I appreciate this type of fabrication. He isn't doing it to add to the excitement of the novel, but to add to the reader's understanding of the war.
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