Tim O'Brian's How to Tell a True War Story of the Things They Carried

The beginnings of the war show the evolution of maturity and how quickly change really can happen. Before the bombing, Diane was described as a "romantic girl," "Not quite a woman," and "waiting for something" (Rylant 4). Stating that Diane is romantic but contrasting it with the fact that she is not a woman gives the impression

Through the writing the reader has a clear picture of the war and through every retelling, no matter how fabricated it is, O’Brien wraps the reader in feeling, feeling as if every aspect is true. In the chapter “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” we are introduced to Mary Anne Bell, the gutsy and curious girlfriend of Mark Fossie. The story is told by Rat Kiley who has a knack for exaggeration. Even still, as O’brien relays the story of the once cute, young girl losing her innocence and her mind in the jungle the reader can’t help but feel as if the story is the happening-truth. The effect Mary Anne has on the reader is too strong to be swept aside as fake.

Mary Anne was the girlfriend of a soldier stationed with Kiley and one night he got the bright idea to bring his girlfriend to the base. When Mary Anne arrived she was sweet and innocent and had no idea what she had just gotten herself into, just like most of the soldiers. By the end of the story, Mary Anne had become a completely different person, she had adopted the bush way of life, started going on late night ambushes with the Green Berets, and acquired a necklace of human tongues. (pages 85-110) The men were all once innocent and quiet, but through the many months in the bush, they began to change. They became more vulgar, extraverted, and confrontational. They feared for their lives and always felt like they had to watch their

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

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.

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

It is a reoccurring theme in many of the chapters. In the chapter “Sweetheart Of The Song Tra Bong”, Mark Fossie’s girlfriend Mary Anne Bell is brought over from the United States to Vietnam. Mary Anne represents innocence itself when she arrives in “white culottes and this sexy pink sweater” (O’Brien 86). The author uses the culottes to convey how fragile and out of place the girl is in Vietnam. This item of clothing is not something one would normally wear into a warzone. This shows the immaturity and youth of the young women; she arrives without almost any knowledge of the war and is seen as young and dumb by the men. This begins to change throughout the rest of the chapter. After a few days, Mary Anne begins to seem at home and become comfortable in a hostile environment (O’Brien 92). Vietnam is quickly and steadily changing the way she thinks and acts. When she becomes comfortable, she is slowly losing her innocence compared to when she first arrived.” She quickly fell into the habits of the bush” (O’Brien 94). She started to not brush her teeth or care about her appearance. She is now becoming “taken over” by the bush and shows the steady decline of innocence in her personality. She continues down this path of no return when she starts hanging out with the greenies (O’Brien 97). The greenies are seen as “outsiders” to the rest of the soldiers. By showing that Mary Anne is being seen hanging out with the Greenies, it shows that her innocence is completely gone now; there is nothing more than anyone can do to help her. Rat Kiley tries to tell Mark Fossie that, “man, you must be deaf. She’s already gone” (O’Brien 107). This metaphor for the loss of innocence is portrayed through a young girl, but applies to every solider in the company. Rat said,” (it) was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it’s never the same (O’Brien 109). It is believed that

Mary Anne was in Vietnam during the war which “had the effect of a powerful drug [..] she wanted more, she

Tim O' Brien, a soldier affected by the Vietnam War, reflects on his experiences when his daughter asks herself if he has ever taken a life. When she is nine years old, nearly 20 years after the Vietnam War is over, Kathleen asks her a question. Has he ever killed someone, she wants to know. O’Brien decides to tell her that he hasn’t. It felt like the “right thing to do”; he thinks when she is a grown-up she will understand better. Maybe then O’Brien will tell her about the slim young man who still obsesses him, whom he still thinks about when reading the newspaper.

The narrative structure of the "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" and "How to Tell a True War Story" contains two levels, the first on being a discourse about the characters of Vietnam

Mary Anne is first presented as a “seventeen-year-old doll in her goddamn culottes, perky and fresh-faced”, which brings about an image of the innocence and an American Dream-esque teenage girl (92). By presenting her as such, O’Brien illustrates the naiveté of someone who is being introduced to war, yet has no experience. She shows up on the first day with no understanding and therefore no knowledge of the severity of war. However, within a page and a half, Mary Anne changes into a girl who could “clip an artery and pump up a plastic sprint…[and who] cut her hair short” (93-94). Like a soldier, Mary Anne did not complain nor shy away from the trauma; she embraced it and fully immersed herself in it. Though she was trying to prove that she was tough and could handle Vietnam, she slowly became more and more invested in the gore and horror of war. After disappearing for days at a time, abandoning her boyfriend, and associating herself with the mysterious “Greenies”, Mary Anne was finally seen “wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues” (110). Although she retained her classic all-American outer appearance, her personality became polar opposite. This is a reality that many soldiers experience, where they turn into shells of their former selves, left with the abyss that war created. While the character of

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:

Mary Anne's curiosity provoked her change. You see this from the way she is described. If it wasn't for her avid nature to learn more about her surroundings she may have stayed the same. She wanted to know everything about Vietnam, she didn't just want to sit back and watch. She wanted to be in the action. "Though she was young, Rat said Mary Anne Bell was no timid child. She was curious about things…asking questions…. listen quietly while someone would fill her in. She had a good quick mind."(95) She was enthralled by her surroundings she wanted to do and know everything, she was in a new place ready and willing to learn unlike the soldiers who were there only because they had too. The speaker shows us this in this quote. "They carried the soldiers greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing…it was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive…they kept humping. They did not submit to the obvious alternative to fall."(21) This quote is to inform the reader that the only reason a solider would go to war and to stay there is from the "fear of blushing" That they weren't there by choice. The term "humping" is used. It is there way of dealing with the war. They just have to keep on ‘humping" and everything would be all right. It was there way

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].”

Being a women during the 50’s Mary Ann was expected to be proper, innocent and unable to understand or handle the extreme emotions and pressures of war, however, she quickly adapted to the war and went against everything expected of her and joined the green berets. O'Brien pushed the irony of Mary Ann’s story even further than just defying gender norms as he juxtaposes innocence and the savagery of war together through Mary Ann's actions and appearance at the end of the chapter. The men all talk about how Mary Ann is still out in the woods fighting, they say; “she was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues” (110). Although it is extremely unlikely that this experience ever happened, O'Brien uses this story to show just how life changing war can be, he proves that even the most innocent person can walk into the war and come out a savage, hostile and war oriented person. Had he never juxtaposed the innocence of Mary Ann and her ‘girly’ clothing against the demented and horrifying necklace of severed tongues, his point may have never had the deep message he wanted to portray. There are many other examples of irony spread throughout the novel, however this example had one of the most powerful message and proof of how