"The truth of history is sometimes truer than the truth that happens." (171) When most people read this quote in The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, they think that the truth of the story is an emotional truth while the truth that happens refers to facts and reality. But beneath the surface we see that the truth is never told. No matter how you tell a story, the truth will never be revealed. The real truth is about our sense of self. Throughout the story "The Lives of the Dead", O'Brien recalls his affair with Linda, his first love. “[Linda] was wearing a new red cap…very unusual.” (217) O'Brien has no idea what is happening to Linda right now, but the cap clearly hides the truth. Only later, when Nick Veenhof furtively removed his cap, was Linda's head revealed "[a] smooth, pale, translucent white." (222) The whiteness of Linda's head seems to refer to a tabula rasa; Linda's purity, but above all the truth. If O'Brien had written that his head was tan or had not even referred to the nature of his head color, then we would not have read this passage carefully. But if you read on, we come across this: “ [t]here was a large patch behind his head” (222) which can be interpreted as hiding the remaining truth. From this point on we can assume that Linda has some sort of fatal disease and this will be confirmed later in the chapter. But what we don't know is how he got it, when he got it, why he got it (genetic or just random), or, more importantly, what he's thinking during this process. This patch covers the remaining answers we have from this point on about Linda. And since she does not speak because Timmy and Linda have a “pure knowledge” (218) of each other, ...... middle of paper ...... rite on Linda to free her memory from the horror she experienced the day her cap was taken off and the visual truth came out. The truth is glorified and considered moral, but if we know that someone will not understand the truth (which happens in most cases), then we tend to bend it. But how flexible is the truth? The expression "stretching the truth" is very relevant in the case of Tim O'Brien. In The Things They Carried, he knows the truth about his characters and his stories, but the truth continues to continually extend throughout his novel and especially with Linda in her dreams. He's not trying to deceive us. In reality he is trying to do the opposite and make us understand the truth, not so much to know it. Understanding the truth is not overrated, it just doesn't fit into words or even expressions. The truth is not for anyone but for yourself.