Truth

"I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. 

Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief. 

Here is the story-truth. He was a slip, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was sut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him." 

From "Good Form" by Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried