What motivates author Tim O'Brien to write his novel?

In the case of Tim O’Brien, who is a fiction writer but has done some non-fiction, the motivation for his writing is fairly easy to spot. O’Brien is best known for his fictional accounts of the Vietnam war in the book, The Things They Carried, and he admits himself that reason he wrote the things that he did was simply because "[he] wants you to feel what [he] felt" (Webster 8).Tim is a Vietnam vet.