Examples Of Mary Anne's Relationship With Mark Fossie

The Vietnam War is a strange and unexplainable event in American history. The controversies surrounding the American involvement in Vietnam and the need for Vietnam veterans to tell their stories of the war are prevalent in the post-Vietnam culture of America. "The stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane"(89). The story of the sweetheart of the Song of Tra Bong explains this quote of the veteran stories never make exact sense, but they are stories from a war that never quite made exact sense either. The story of "Sweetheart of the Song of Tra Bong," involving a young girl coming to Vietnam

Mary Anne is portrayed as the best woman in the book. She is only seventeen and her high school sweetheart, Mark Fossie, arranges it so

In the short story, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” by Tim O’Brien, the author shows that no matter what the circumstances were, the people that were exposed to the Vietnam War were affected greatly. A very young girl named Mary Anne Bell was brought by a boyfriend to the war in Vietnam. When she arrived she was a bubbly young girl, and after a few weeks, she was transformed into a hard, mean killer.

You can't feel like that anywhere else’”(O’Brien 111). Mary Anne is inevitably drawn to the other side—the other side in this case being the Vietnam War itself. She is not completely part of it yet but she sure is fascinated by it, and will be part of it soon. She displays the danger of throwing away all separation between herself and the war. She is at the point where she wants to become one with the war. However towards the end of the story, Mary Ann becomes a completely different person. This can be shown perfectly in the quote, “She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill”(O’Brien 116).

From the moment Mary Anne arrives at the base, the other soldiers know that this was a mistake. But Mark Fossie, blinded by love, doesn’t realize this. He believes that Mary Anne’s innocence could be preserved. But oh how he was wrong. In perhaps the greatest mistake in the entire Vietnam war, a soldier brought his girlfriend to Vietnam. Quickly her innocence disappears, and she turns into something wicked. She wears a necklace of human tongues and begins to take risks not even Ethan Hunt would. She behaves dangerously; she refuses to carry a weapon. This wickedness fundamentally changes Mary Anne’s personality and her attitude toward life. While she feels that she is finding herself, she is instead losing herself. May Anne loses herself to the jungle and the war. Like a hyperbole of the entire Vietnam era, Mary Anne loses her purpose. Around this time, some might say so did the American Dream. Contributing to the entropy of the American Dream, soldiers felt lost, confused, and in a metaphorical fog. Soldiers stopped thinking of the war as just good and bad, and instead as one of lesser

Martin, she spoke of the hard lives women dealt with during the war. She wrote about how the women who were affected by the war and how they reacted to their situation. She went into many aspects of different women’s experiences by their writings and actions throughout the war. There were many examples of pain and heartache that the women of this time dealt with. Women of this time period were forgotten, as well as the pain they suffered from all that came with the war. This author helped me to understand the strength that these women untimely had to have in order to deal with these hard times. I felt that there wasn’t enough credit giving to the women of those

Another time when a soldier’s experience is projected onto Mary Anne is comparing how Mary Anne started to become quieter along with some of Rat Kiley’s experiences towards the end of his tenure in Vietnam. After Mary Anne had been involved with the war for a few weeks, “she fell into a restless gloom” (O’Brien 100). Along with the change in emotional state, she began to physically isolate herself (O’Brien 100). This part of Mary Anne’s transformation is a projection of what happened to Rat Kiley later in the book. The entire chapter of “Night Life” discusses how the war changed the once bright and zany Rat Kiley into someone barely able to function. As his physical and mental condition began to be impacted by the trauma he has seen, he “[sank] inside inside himself” (O’Brien 209). He “wouldn’t say a word” (O’Brien 209). The silence overcame Rat Kiley is an experience projected

This chapter covers the transition of Mary Anne Bell, of how she changed from being a normal, sweet teenage girl to being one of the Green Berets, filled with enthusiasm for the war and intrigued with the culture of Vietnam. This message is about how the innocence of women is consumed by the war and how once they begin to learn more about it, they are hopelessly entranced by it, far from returning to their usual selves. Rat talks about how, “Anne made you think about those girls back home, how they'll never understand any of this, not in a billion years. Try and tell them about it, they’ll just stare at you with those big round candy eyes. They won't understand zip.”(O’Brien 108), and this shows that women won’t understand what Vietnam really is like, they have to experience it themselves. Women also won’t understand the grueling mental pain that soldiers experience in the 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.

Change In The Things They Carried a war novel by Tim O'Brien, we are told many short stories compiled to make a whole. I want to emphasis on the importance of the chapter "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong". In this chapter we are introduced to the character Mary Anne. She shows the changing power of Vietnam, that a sweet innocent young girl can come into this land and be forever consumed by her surroundings. The speaker show us this through character action, character description, dialogue and metaphor; this enhances the literary work by showing us that the soldiers will always be a part of Vietnam no matter how hard they try to get away from it.

Mary Anne is portrayed as the best woman in the book. She is only seventeen and her high school sweetheart, Mark Fossie, arranges it so

"Twice/ she came in late at night. Very late. And then finally she did not come in at all." (99). Mark became worried that she might be sleeping with someone else. He woke up Rat and him go check out the barracks to see if Mary Anne was with any of the guys. "All accounted for. No extras." (101). Then they got the idea that she was with the "Greenies" and she was, in a way. Mary Anne was out on Ambush with the Green Beret's. Poor Mark Fossie tried to talk some sense into her, but it was to no avail. Before long Mary Anne was gone again, this time there would be no reckoning with her. She had made her decision to be where she felt she belonged. When Mark finally realized this, he was hit with an emotional artillery shell that could have taken

Mary-Anne was a completely different story all together. "The way Rat told it, she came in by helicopter along with the daily resupply shipment out of Chi Lai. A tall big-boned blonde." She came from the sky like it was no big deal, to see her boyfriend Fossie. A girl coming into a war among the rations and medicine. She was barely a woman, only 17, and when she came to join them at the medical camp she was described as, "had long white legs and blue eyes and a complexion like strawberry ice cream. Very friendly too." It was the "very friendly" part that should have been the problem. It was a

The Greenies report that "a couple of times they almost saw her sliding through the shadows," but she would never return from the jungle (O'Brien 125). "She was part of the land" (125). Like Kurtz, Mary Anne crosses the line by losing her self-control to a primordial madness because of the forces of the Vietnam environment.

Ever since then women proved that they can work in a man’s workplace and do just as well. Any job that was a man’s, was a women’s as well. Women were soon “the most needed workers of all” according to Brenda Ralf Lewis. Factory workers became known as “the soldiers without guns”. If women hadn’t stepped up to the line, winning the war wouldn’t have been as easy as it was for us. Not only did the women in factories and shipyards have a big part in doing their part in the war contributions, but so did the women who were out on the field fighting alongside with their men risking their very life.