War Story Genre?

After reading everything I have to question whether or not O’Brien’s The Things They Carried can be classified as a war story genre because it isn’t your typical war story. I am going to have to use the words of my peer Stacy to describe O’Brien’s The Things They Carried “he is reminiscing his experiences in war” which is all he really is doing. In all three of the readings O’Brien constantly states the fact “I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier.” He doesn’t always say it word for word but it is always a variation of it, sometimes he won’t even tell you where he was and he will just tell you the war have been over for a long time now. He also tends to repeat and put a lot of emphasis on things like the corpse he saw “ His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman’s, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his finger-nails were clean, the skin on his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny.” These are the kind of images that you would see in a war story film and it turns out that it is the only war like thing in O’Brien’s writing. A lot of it is just fluff, like how them having a mellow war and people playing checkers and other stuff which doesn’t really do much to justify The Things They Carried being in the genre war story. When Foucault was discussing the classification of animals he said this one thing that caught my attention “ if all the animals divided up here can be placed without exception in one of the divisions of the list, then aren’t all the other divisions to be found in that one division too?” It made me think if it was actually possible to put everything in a genre with no exception because some things are a mixture of two or more genres or classification groups. In Chandlers reading there was a part where someone said “Assigning a text to a genre sets up initial expectations” and O’Brien’s literature didn’t meet my expectations to be considered a war story genre.