How do "The Things They Carried" and "If I Die in a Combat Zone" compare in themes?

I think the themes in both are pretty similar. Like most of the literature of the Vietnam war, "The Things They Carried" is shaped by the personal combat experience of the author. O'Brien is adamant, however, that the fiction not be mistaken for factual accounts of events. In an interview with Michael Coffey of Publishers Weekly soon after the book was published, O'Brien claims: "My own experience has virtually nothing to do with the content of the book." Indeed the title page of the book announces it as "a work of fiction." The book is dedicated, however, "to the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa." O'Brien himself was in infantryman in Alpha Company and was stationed in the Quang Ngai province in 1969-70. When asked about this device in an interview with Martin Narparsteck in Contemporary Literature, O'Brien explains: "What I'm saying is that even with that nonfiction-sounding element in the story, everything in the story is fiction, beginning to end. To classify different elements of the story as fact or fiction seems to me artificial. Literature should be looked at not for its literal truths but for its emotional qualities. What matters in literature, I think, are the pretty simple things—whether it moves me or not, whether it feels true. The actual literal truth should be superfluous."

Clearly O'Brien wants readers to wrestle with the distinctions between fact and fiction. What matters for him, as he explained at a conference on the literature of the Vietnam War, is the "power of stories, whether they're true, or embellished, and exaggerated, or utterly made up. A good story has a power . . . that transcends the question of factuality or actuality." In the beginning of the last story in The Things They Carried, O'Brien reveals the reasons why he tells these tales: "Stories can save us." Offering a fuller explanation in an interview with Publishers Weekly, O'Brien says, "If there is a theme to the whole book it has to do with the fact that stories can save our lives."