Sweetheart of the Song of Tra Bong as Metaphor Essay

The Vietnam War that commenced on November 1, 1955, and ended on April 30, 1975, took the soldiers through a devastating experience. Many lost their lives while others maimed as the war unfolded into its full magnitude. The book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam by Bernard Edelman presents a series of letters written by the soldiers to their loved ones and families narrating the ordeals and experiences in the Warfield. In the book, Edelman presents the narrations of over 200 letters reflecting the soldiers’ experiences on the battlefield. While the letters were written many decades ago, they hold great significance as they can mirror the periods and the contexts within which they were sent. This paper takes into account five letters from different timelines and analyzes them against the events that occurred in those periods vis a vis their significance. The conclusion will also have a personal opinion and observation regarding the book and its impacts.

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).

Rat Kiley had told a story of a girl that was shipped to Vietnam and had stayed with them at the camp. Mary Anne Bell had begun as a normal innocent girl that slowly delved into herself and became one with the land disappearing into the forest.

While the Vietnam War was a complex political pursuit that lasted only a few years, the impact of the war on millions of soldiers and civilians extended for many years beyond its termination. Soldiers killed or were killed; those who survived suffered from physical wounds or were plagued by PTSD from being wounded, watching their platoon mates die violently or dealing with the moral implications of their own violence on enemy fighters. Inspired by his experiences in the war, Tim O’Brien, a former soldier, wrote The Things They Carried, a collection of fictional and true war stories that embody the

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.

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.

The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.

"I have tried to describe accurately what the dominant event in the life of my generation, the Vietnam War, was like for the men who fought it" (Caputo, p. xxi). In Philip Caputo's own words, he describes the book he tried to write as an accurate portrayal of the events of the Vietnam War, not as he wished it had happened and not in protest of what happened. To this end, Caputo was successful. His book, A Rumor of War, provides a poignant and evocative glance into the lives of real men who fought in a war which no one who was not there could ever truly understand. In going about this, he touches on a variety of recurring themes in his book: the romanticizing of war vs. actual war, the personal aspects of war vs. impersonal aspects of war,

In Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, Tim O'Brien gives a dynamic example of how even the deep roots of ones culture can be modified. The focus is on the young lady, whose boyfriend manages to have her shipped over to Vietnam from the U.S. She is then thrown into a completely foreign culture that thousands of American GI's were experiencing. This change in culture affected the strongest and most skilled of America's ground troops. The affects on a civilian are almost unfathomable.

In the chapters “How to Tell a True War Story,” “Speaking of Courage” and “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” of The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien seems to be emphasizing the lack of both empathy and sympathy from the rest of society towards soldiers and veterans. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Mitchell Sanders tells Tim O’Brien a story about six men on silent patrol up in the mountains in Vietnam who begin to hear strange noises and radio for the place to be demolished. When the colonel asks them why they did this, the men say nothing and simply stare at him thinking, “you got wax in your ears… you don’t even want to hear this” (72). Later, Sanders informs O’Brien that the moral of the story came to him. He states that the moral is about how

When she came back he keeps a close eye on her and won’t let her out of his sight. Mary Anne left with a special forces unit, called the Greenies on a mission for weeks on end, but when she came back she had gone crazy. She had a necklace of tongues and there was stacks of bones and dried strips of skin hanging from the wall of the Greenies’ house. She had used a culture of Vietnam to make up for the hole left by her previous American culture. People use other cultures to make up for their old

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.

As Mary Anne’s questions got answered her curiosity ran deeper. Her need for understanding Vietnam was high: “She wanted to get a feel for how people lived, what the smells and customs were” (O’Brien 91-92). She new it was dangerous but her inner personality was slowly showing. Not only are her views changing, but so are some of the other men’s. Eddie Diamond knows exactly what is going on “There’s the scary part. I promise you, this girl will most definitely learn” (O’Brien 92). Her transformation is really peaking at this point and she isn’t trying to hid it at all. Instead, in a way she is trying to show it off. She is learning new skills day by day that spark her wild side and she is not afraid of the ugly. Due to Mary Anne’s wild side

For example, many of the soldiers did meet “on Parris Island” for training and often “passed the hash pipe and played [their] Doors tapes” while in Southeast Asia. Although this ballad may not be the most appropriate source for my paper, it was still beneficial to examine since it brought out strong emotions in me about the Vietnam War and has made me even more interested in the subject.