Impressions of The Things They Carried

There are some pretty universal absolutes in life which I have never thought to question. I have always valued absolute honesty and morality. I have always been fairly certain of the right and wrong thing to do in most situations, and that the only thing to do is the right thing to do. That is why I found many of O'Brien's points in this novel to be so mind boggling; he exposed the actual ambiguity surrounding things I previously accepted to be absolutes.
Truth, morality, right and wrong, he proposed, are contradictory and uncertain. Something as wrong as war is filled with beautiful things, like the strongest of brotherhoods only able to be forged in the most extreme of situations. He passes off fictitious stories as truer than truth, and I don't disagree with him, but I don't understand why either. This novel was incredibly thought provoking in the way it dealt with ideas that I was so sure of as flexible and blurred.