The Truth in Things

This article that we were to read, "The Truth in Things," was kind of long, and while I did read it, I can't say I didn't get a little lost at some points. Also, I may or may not have lost interest in sections of the article. What can I say, I have a very short attention span. However, I think I kind of maybe sort of get what the author, a Mr. Jim Neilson, was trying to say, so hopefully this here post will make some sort of sense. So now, here it goes!
I don't know if there was one or two main points Neilson was trying to make, but as far as I could tell, he was saying that O'Brien used postmodern elements in his writing, yet he failed to give representation to the Vietnamese perspective of the war, which is something that he should have done as a postmodernist. This is because postmodernism is all about giving representation to the repressed or under-represented views or positions on any subject, and "The Things They Carried" gave only O'Brien's perspective. Neilson asserts that by writing "a text that is obsessed with self, that details the uncertain effects of an unreal war upon an unknowable self but fails to examine its all too real effects upon the Vietnamese," O'Brien "constructed a text that, despite its radical aesthetic, largely reaffirms the prevailing ethnocentric conception of the war."
The insight that I was able to gain from the article was that about how the collection of stories was a concentration on O'Brien's self, or that while he was being Postmodernistic in not trying to pretend that his view of the stories was the one any only "truth" or way that things were, he was not Postmodernistic in that he still only presented one way that tings could have been. The only insight the audience is allowed to the war is through O'Brien.
Okay, that's all. Bye byes