Effects Of The War: Mary Anne Versus The Soldiers

He was proud, yes, but also amazed. A different person, it seemed, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it.” She stopped wearing makeup and jewelry. She cut her hair short and wrapped it in a dark bandana. She was beginning to look like a man. She learned how to shoot a gun. Mary Anne began talking her and Mark’s future. Instead of getting married like they had planned, she wants to just live together for a while to see what it’s like. Everything about her was changing. She was no longer bubbly, she rarely laughed, and she was going off on her own more and more. One night she never came home. She had spent all night with the green berets on ambush. When Mary returned, she was hardly recognizable. Mark was fed up, he made her wash her hair and clean up. Things seemed to be all right. But there was a great deal of tension between them. Finally, Mark started talking about sending her back home. Mary Anne was gone the next morning along with the 6 other green berets. When she returned, her appearance had completely changed. “It was then, Rat said, that he picked out Mary Anne’s face. Her eyes seemed to shine in the dark-not blue, though, but a bright glowing jungle green. She did not pause at Fossie’s bunker. She cradled her weapon and moved swiftly to the Special Forces hooch and followed the others inside.” When Mark entered the green berets hooch, he first thought he saw the same old sweet Mary Anne. She was wearing a pink sweater and a skirt. But there was no

When she enters the bedroom, her voice changes from present to past tense and she starts to reminisce and begins to talk about her mother and aunts. She seems happy to remember her mother’s room and introduces her aunts to the audiences. Mary delivers her dialogue saying that the dressing table and the small elephant statue figures are all same. When Mary gently touches her mother’s photo, she delivers a sad tone. Her performance conveys to the audiences that she misses her mother. The tone of her voice represents that she is a gentle, innocent and a loving child. Her verbal and non-verbal interactions conveyed the viewers with a message that she is an orphan.

In the chapter, “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, we meet an interesting character named Mary Anne. She was a seventeen year old lady who just got out of high school and went to visit her boyfriend Mark Fossie in Vietnam. It started out as just visiting a childhood sweetheart, except it all changed in a matter of weeks. Mary Anne began to take too much interest and she became engulfed in vietnam. She wasn’t all too careful, rather than her swallowing the land, she was swallowed whole by it. Vietnam changed Mary Anne into something she never thought that she would become, she changed into a lone soldier, physically, behaviorally and psychologically.

The Things They Carried is a war story based on the Vietnam War. One story the author, Tim O 'Brien tells is the story of Mary Anne, Mark Fossie’s childhood sweetheart. Mary Anne’s curiosity allows her to acquire knowledge about Vietnam’s culture and language. She wants to learn about Vietnam, the war and what they do. She also isn’t afraid and is eager to aid the casualties. One night she goes out on an ambition with the Green Berets, and the next day she and Fossie become engaged. Eventually she disappears for 3 weeks only to arrive at the special forces hut, and when seen Mary Anne is wearing the same outfit as before, but with a necklace of human tongues around her neck. She says what happened isn’t bad. In the end, she crossed to the other side never coming back, becoming one with the land. Mary Anne symbolizes war soldiers going through the war getting consumed by the darkness of the war.

Mary Ann, the cute blond with the cosmetic bag and pink sexy sweater portrays the perfect picture of a high school sweetheart of the seventies. She is being imported "with the daily resupply shipment" and presented as an object of the men's enjoyment. "The men genuinely liked her" means they liked what they saw, her body. But this image of Mary

The community she once loved turned to her with hatred, but she still consoled them. The sufferings she experienced as a loving wife and a mother, did not discourage her. The uncertainty about her morality vanished because she stood her moral grounds due to her solid faith in God. It is true that Mary was not a member of the Revolutionary army. However, armed with community concern, love for her husband, and strong moral values, Mary Silliman fought and won her own war.

Mary Hutchinson was by far the most glorious and loving person through-out the novel, and loved by all that knew her, “We all loved one another but somehow every one of us had a special work with Polly. She was so bright and cheery and brave” (Pg.7). She was a young seamstress who lived a simple life, making an honest living and was very close to her loving family. She had been pursued by her co-worker the young Jack Wilson, who fall in love with her (or so she thought), but it was normal for people to be attracted to her beautiful nature. After years of courting they had finally gotten married and had children of their own, although the second would not be born until the “father” I say vaguely had left the country. This once highly sought after woman would now be left to care for two young children while her husband moved countries to find work (not to mention flee embarrassment). This was the moment that would change her life for the worst, only she hadn’t known it yet.

From culottes and cheerleading in little old Ohio to a necklace of tongues and Green berets in the jungles of Vietnam, Mary Anne Bell makes the war just a little better for her beau and their love an amusement for the other soldiers on the base. It worked, everything was fine, until the innocence she had brought with her wore off and eventually just disappeared completely. She proved the power that women could have over men, Fossie cared for her until he went mad with worry for her. He just couldn’t understand why she had changed the way she did. He isn’t happy so why is she? He tries to figure it out, but it doesn’t work very well:

Pages 93 and 94 state “Mark Fossie grinned and put his arm around her and said, guys, this is Mary Anne”. This part in the chapter is where he got his girlfriend to there camp. He paid a-lot of money and set up 4 flights to get her there. Page 95 states “Mary Anne Bell was an attractive girl.

Some of the people and revolutionary heroes in the war were women, George Washington, Paul Revere, and slaves. When men left to fight, women had new roles and jobs to do. When the women worked as carpenters, farmers, and shipbuilders, they must have been very successful because since most of the men were gone, they could do as much as they needed. They took over the jobs that men used to do. For example, women farmed, carpenters, and built ships. Some of the wives followed their husbands in the war and did new jobs in it. In the war, the jobs that they

Mary Rowlandson was held captive by the Wampanoag peoples. In this narrative she gives details on what happened to her while she was a prisoner for weeks. Mary was captured along with her three children, two of which she was separated from and the other one died in Mary’s arms on the ninth day. She then went and saw her ten year old, who, upon seeing her mother, broke down in tears resulting in them not being able to have much further contact. Her captors made her march along for miles until they reach a river that they crossed on canoes. Mary stays there a while sewing and knitting for some of the Native peoples living there. She then is given a knife in which she promptly returns to her master, who lets her go see her son. She gets lost in

However, this quote foreshadows what happens to her, seeing as many soldiers would be unnerved at Vietnam, yet Mary Anne, on the other hand, accepts her surroundings. “There was no emotion in her stare, no sense of the person behind it” (105). As a result of her acceptance, Rat comments on her having “ ...a necklace of human tongues” (105). The end result of Mary Anne’s transformation is finally shown here. It ties back to Tim O’brien’s belief that the solders had, “...no sense of the person behind [their stare].”

At the beginning of the chapter I believed that the protagonist was Fossie, however, it wasn’t it was Mary Anne. Throughout the chapter it was shown how she was changing form a kind and goofy girl that just seemed to be there for her boyfriend, to a heartless and fearless woman that wanted to kill and be part of the war. O’Brien uses figurative language to add description within his paragraphs and stories. He uses imagery to describe specific things in detail such as a necklace, “ At the girl’s throat was a necklace of human tongues. Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a length of copper wire, one tongue overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrills syllable,”

“She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill” (O’Brien 110). These are the last sentences in “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” chapter of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. After reading this quote it is hard to imagine that they describe a seventeen-year-old girl, fresh out of high school. Nonetheless, the description of Mary Anne Bell, a young girl from suburban United States, is accurate.

When Mary Anne came to Vietnam, she was described as “happy”(89), “curious”(91) along with having “a good sharp mind”(93). Mary Anne was just a normal teenage lady just out of high school and “the war intrigued her”(91) She enjoyed learning learning everything that the guys taught her. Her curiosity symbolizes how adventurous she could be, and foreshadows how lost she would become. Her sharp mind symbolized how ready she was to be in the combat zone and how fast she learned things.