Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried, is composed of a series of vignettes that, as separated as some may seem from the story, all come together to form a cohesive and symbolic novel. A prevalent theme of this novel is the focus on women, and the effect that they have on the soldiers -mere boys- caught in Vietnam. To some of the young men, girls are the one thing they can rely on to provide their dreams with a happy place. To others, the females of their life only cause them pain and misery as they watch them slip away. Of all the stories of women and their feminine destruction, the chapter "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" is one that I felt depicted one of the most heartbreaking and brutal instances of a girl and her interaction with the soldiers in Vietnam.


Mary Anne is her name, this destroyer of high school hopes and dreams. She shows up at the medic's camp in all her blond and perky glory, the proof of miracles in a war zone. She is the subject of awe for so many of the men, as they enviously watch she and Mark walk away from them, hand in hand. In her first week at the medic compound Mary Anne seems to be quite the treat for the men, who for so long have been deprived of a pretty face. She is seemingly harmless, a picture of innocence, but there is something about her that the men just cannot quite place. As the men watch Mary Anne as she asks her constant questions, they are impressed by her zest for knowledge, and her need for answers. Although she seems to be somewhat limited on brains, the men believe she will learn just fine. After this comment, one of Mark's fellow soldiers says: " There's the scary part. I promise you, this girl will definitely learn." In a vague use of foreshadowing, Tim O'Brien indicates that the innocence of this girl is going to wear off, and she may eventually prove all of the medics wrong.

True to the soldier's comment, Mary Anne does learn. She soaks up information like a sponge, eager to learn as much as she can. She learns to shoot a gun, to paint her face, to walk without making a sound. She begins to go off on ambush missions with the Green Berets, not telling anyone that she is leaving. Mary Anne becomes the perfect soldier: emotionless, dedicated, and always in search of a kill. And one day, the "scary part" comes to be realized: "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." The scariness of the situation was not that fact that Mary Anne had learned as much as she had, but instead the fact that she went through such a drastic transformation. The change of Mary Anne from a young, innocent high school girl, to an intent and surefooted soldier is what stirs fear in the men. She is representative of what the men themselves are as soldiers, or what they are becoming as they spend more time in Vietnam. Mary Anne does not destroy the lives of men through her departure from Mark, she destroys the mentality that war will not change them, that they are the same now as when they left home. Mary Anne shatters the idea of normalcy, of going home to have things remain the same. Her metamorphosis is symbolic of the way in which war changes people, of how life can never be the same after the blood and pain of combat. For Mary Anne, the true effect of the war on her, in such a short amount of time, is her loss of innocence. The Vietnam War took so many naive young men and opened their eyes to the horror and destruction of war. Some loved it, some couldn't handle it, and some tried their best to ignore it. They all had to do their best to survive, and Mary Anne turning into a piece of Vietnam was her survival skill. By becoming one with her environment, she is adapting to her environment, and more accepting of the destruction around her.

Mary Anne, in becoming one of the soldiers, shows the change people go through when they are exposed to gore and violence on a daily basis. She is the epitome of adaptation. This girl is so frightening to the men because of how quickly she changes, and also how true her transformation is. Amongst men, they can deny that they change at all. But to have a woman come into the war, and see a stereotypically innocent and kind person turn into a war machine shows the men just how much they have changed. O'Brien effectively uses Mary Anne, not as a tool of destruction of men's emotions, but rather, the destruction of the men's lies to themselves. She destroys any notion that the war has not changed them, and she creates a living, exaggerated example of what they have become. That is the scary part.