In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, he expresses a difference between "story truth" and "happening truth". "Story truth", I would say, is him expressing real life stories but not how they legitimately happened, yet still getting the meaning and the feeling across. On the flip side, that would make "happening truth" what actually happened, events and all. O'Brien definitely prefers to play with "story truth" more because he retells a story of Kiowa's death multiple times throughout the book in different chapters, each time it is told differently. However, the reader still has sympathy for Kiowa when he dies no matter how the story is told. The fact that O'Brien had a friend who he lost in the war still pulls on the reader's heartstrings. He notes at one point in the text that a true war story "makes the stomach believe", and that is why he favors "story truth" over "happening truth".