The infallibility of a work cannot be defined by the input of the imagination, facts become false when exaggerated. The Things They Carried is a collection of short stories that revolve around the Vietnam War. Tim O'Brien takes the reader back to the late 1960s and reflects on the experiences that emotionally scarred Vietnamese soldiers. O'Brien shares several war stories believed to be authentic during the war and migrates to the 1980s in states like Iowa and Massachusetts to discuss how these stories influenced his life. The Things They Carried is a collection of fake war stories altered in authenticity in the hopes of evoking strong emotions in readers. Tim O'Brien invents stories to convey specific messages to readers. O'Brien shares a war story with readers about a baby buffalo. At first he states that the story has been told many times and is indeed factual. The story is about one of the soldiers known as Rat Riley, who is then said to have casually murdered a baby buffalo for no reason. O'Brien's analysis of Riley's abhorrent behavior is that the war caused him to kill the baby buffalo because war is hell. Riley uses the mammal as a means to free himself from the burdens the negativity of war has placed on him, but O'Brien then divulges to the reader the invalidity of the story when an outsider misunderstands the gist of the story . "She wasn't listening...no Rat Riley. No trail junctions. No baby buffalo. No vines or moss or white flowers. From start to finish, tell her, it's all made up. Every fucking detail - the mountains and the river and especially that poor stupid baby buffalo. None of that happened" (85). O'Brien procrastinated on Rat Riley's dark encounter with a baby buffalo because he wants his paper heart to tell it through a disastrous love story that grabs the reader's attention. Riley uses Mary Anne as a symbol for ordinary people, who are not exposed to war. But when Mary Anne is exposed to the influence of war, her whole personality changes. Riley changes the real story of how war changes people because he understands that a love story gone wrong is more interesting. We must not modify the truth to make it popular, because then the truth would disappear. O'Brien alters the authenticity of his stories to gain reader approval, causing his stories to lose their honesty. Altered facts are no longer facts. Works Cited O'Brien, Tim. The things they carried: a work of fiction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Print.Bruckner, DJR “A Storyteller for the War That Will Not End.” » The New York Times. The New York Times, April 3, 1990. Web. January 1. 2014.