In “The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong,” Rat Kiley recounts the time when Mark Fossie brought in his girlfriend, Mary Anne Bell, from Ohio to Nam. Mary Anne is a curious and very friendly seventeen-year- old girl who just graduated from high school. She constantly asks questions about the war. Tension grows between Mary Anne and Mark when Mary Anne starts to become more involved in the war. She helps with taking care of the injured soldiers and learns how to operate an M-16. Mark suggests that the two of them go back home, but Mary Anne refuses. She begins to return to the camp late at night, or not at all. One day in the early morning, Mark cannot find Mary Anne and panics, only to discover that she is out on an ambush with the Green Berets. Mark has a talk with Mary Anne in which they make plans to get married. However, over the next several weeks, an undeniable tension grows between the two. Mary Anne suddenly disappears after Mark starts to make plans for her return home. After about three weeks, Mary Anne returns to the camp and disappears into the Special Forces area, and Mark waits for her there. He hears a woman, Mary Anne, chanting along with strange music and bursts into the hootch to confront her. O’Brien uses disturbing imagery to emphasize how the war takes away one’s innocence and changes one forever.
When Mark confronts Mary Anne after she returns from the ambush with the Green Berets, O’Brien uses disturbing imagery to describe the inside of the hootch. The room’s smell has a “topmost scent of joss sticks and incense” (104), but also has “deeper and much more powerful stench [that is] thick and numbing…a mix of blood and scorched hair and excrement and the sweet-sour odor of moldering flesh—the stink of ...
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...with] no emotion in [them]” (105). Before the coming to the war, Mary Anne is sweet, innocent, and curious. But now, she has matured and looks upon the world indifferently.
After experiencing the war first-hand, Mary Anne finds her place in the world—in Vietnam with the Green Berets. When she first arrives at the camp, she is a young, innocent girl who does not know anything about the war; however, after staying at the camp for a few weeks and learning about the war, she loses her innocence. Mary Anne’s loss of innocence is reflected in the disturbing imagery used to describe the smell of the Special Forces hootch and her necklace of human tongues. Mary Anne’s true personality is shown when she is chanting along with tribal music in the Special Army hootch. She is no longer an innocent girl but is an experienced young woman with a burning passion for the war.
Mary Anne was introduced in one of Rat Kiley’s stories. Mark Fossie had been dating her since the sixth grade and even had plans of marriage, so one day she showed up to war. She started the war very innocent and curious. She wore a pink sweater and was very friendly (89). By the end of the war, she was a completely different person. She had turned into a “greenie” at war. Eddie had even found her with a human tongue necklace (105). One day Mary Anne disappeared. Some even say she is now a part of the land, and that she crossed to the other side (110). Mary Anne is introduced to show the audience how much war can actually change a person. The things that the men see and experience during the war can make them a completely different person. War can make people lose themselves. Mary Anne proved this. I also feel that being in a new place that you have never been, can make you realize something what you really love. This was also the case for Mary Anne. She had never experienced anything like the war, so after being a part of it, I think that she had a thrill from it. This can also relate to many people today. Often times when someone goes into college or another chapter of their life, they realize thing that they enjoy, without even knowing. Mary Anne had discovered a part of her life that she loved, without
Rat states "She'd hopped a C-130 up to Chu Lai and stayed overnight at the USO and the next morning hooked a ride west with the resupply chopper"(90). It is irrational for this to happen and in war, a high school girl cannot climb on to a plane without notice. Even though this event appears to be fake, Rat succeeds on what he is doing to readers--showing how desperate and lonely soldiers are in war. A Vietnam soldier will go to crazy lengths for a woman or something that allow them to get away from war and forget
Exposing the Truth in Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong "Dear Mom and Dad: The war that has taken my life, and many thousands of others before me, is immoral, unlawful, and an atrocity," (letter of anonymous soldier qtd. In Fussell (653). Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam War vet, had similar experiences as the soldier above. Even though O'Brien didn't die, the war still took away his life because a part of him will never be the same.
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 greatly affected. 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. Mark Fossie decided he was going to sneak his girlfriend onto his base in Vietnam. When she arrived, Rat Kiley described her as, “A tall big-boned blonde.
In the two novels of recent war literature Redeployment, by Phil Klay, and The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, both call attention to the war’s destruction of its soldiers’ identities. With The Things They Carried, we are introduced to the story of a young Lieutenant Jimmy Cross who is currently fighting in the Vietnam War and holds a deep crush for his college-lover Martha. Jimmy carries many letters from Martha with him throughout the war, and he envisions this romantic illusion in which “more than anything, he want[s] Martha to love him as he love[s] her” (1). However, a conflict quickly transpires between his love for Martha and his responsibilities with the war, in which he is ultimately forced to make a decision between the two.
Mary Anne Bell is a character who was sent to Vietnam for a purpose. It seemed as if Mary Anne was the one that would be the one who would support Mark Fossie and better yet, to get married while they were in Vietnam so that their childhood dreams would come true. The war is something and somewhere that can make a person experience 180 changes. It seems as if Mary Anne Bell’s a person who’s lost her cute personality after she was just too involved with the war that was going on. It has been said that a war can truly change a person so much that they can lose all their old characteristics or better yet, their appearance.
into the story of a seemingly misplaced girl in Vietnam. The role of Rat Kiley
Character analysis Annemarie is a normal young girl, ten years old, she has normal difficulties and duties like any other girl. but these difficulties aren’t normal ones, she’s faced with the difficulties of war. This war has made Annemarie into a very smart girl, she spends most of her time thinking about how to be safe at all times “Annemarie admitted to herself,snuggling there in the quiet dark, that she was glad to be an ordinary person who would never be called upon for courage.” (4.60) even though shes going through a lot she still controls it very well.
Tim O'Brien's story "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" is like Apocalypse Now in that it is also about a character who "crossed to the other side." Her name is Mary Anne and her boyfriend, Mark Fossie, has her shipped over to Vietnam to be with him. However, instead of reacting to the atmosphere of the war as Fossie thougbt she would, she becomes fascinated with the mystery of it, and over the course of the story is completely drawn in by the jungle's allure. Over a period of weeks, she disappears on ambushes with a nearby squad of Green Berets and when finally confronted by Fossie, he fi...
...away with the negatives. Anne said, “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer. There’ve always been people that’ve have to…sometimes one race…sometimes another…and yet…” (Goodrich and Hackett 117). The reader is amused with the way that Anne keeps her composure and a positive outlook throughout one of the most horrendous times in this world’s history. Anne contained the endurance and willpower to kept striving to freedom. Anne Frank withheld a special characteristic that no one could take away from her, and that is why Anne Frank is who she is now. Anne set a standard to young women to show that they can be courageous and strong like her, and to have a bright spirit even when you are at your lowest. Anne set the example to show that whether you are a girl or boy, old or young, you can be brave, and you can push through tough times with a little help of hope.
Mary Anne was a bright girl and she wanted to learn all that she could about the war and the land. Her new found purpose becae to find as much as she could about the culture while she was in it. She often went for nature walks and began to learn the Vietnamese language/culture . Even her personality began to change. But eventually she began to learn about guns and war. She started to spend her free time cleaning and shooting. This began the downward trail to her becoming a camo wearing jungle woman.
Mark Fossie arranges a way to get his girlfriend down to Nam and a big change happens. Fossies girlfriend, Mary Anne Bell, was straight out of high school only seventeen years old. Once she gets there Fossie is the happiest man on earth. Just watching her dance and goof around making him get a grin on her face. She starts to hang around all the men and having a good time. Mary Anne begins to act a little more like the troops by not being afraid to get dirty and become a stronger fearless woman. She goes out with them into the woods, learns how to disassemble and shoot an M16, and to feed/hunt on her own. Then she starts acting less and less like the girl Fossie met on the first day Mary Anne came to visit. In the novel O’Brien says “her body seemed foreign somehow- too stiff in places, too firm where the softness used to be. The bubbliness was gone. The nervous giggling, too. When she laughed now, which was rare, it was only when something struck her as truly funny.” (O’Brien 94-95) which is showing how much the atmosphere there has changed her. War has changed her. The hot days, dirty jobs, and around all the dangerous forest area that could hold the enemies. She is becoming distant of Fossie and a whole new different person. O’Brien also says “In the evenings, while the men played cards, she would sometimes fall into long elastic silence, her eyes fixed on the dark, her arms folded, her foot tapping out a code message against the floor.” Which also shows she had changed. More distant and almost gives off a lost feeling in her eyes. She begins to come back really late at night and sometimes not coming back at all. In the end Mark Fossie approaches her after listening to her beautiful singing and tries to figure out why she has change or why she almost seems to have no interest in him anymore. She
Throughout the novel, Tim O’Brien illustrates the extreme changes that the soldiers went through. Tim O’Brien makes it apparent that although Vietnam stole the life of millions through the death, but also through the part of the person that died in the war. For Tim O’Brien, Rat Kiley, Mary Anne and Norman Bowker, Vietnam altered their being and changed what the world knew them as, into what the world could not understand.
Mary Anne is initially introduced to the audience, narrated by Rat Kiley, as an innocent and naïve young woman present in Vietnam solely to visit her boyfriend, Mark Fossie. She arrives in “white culottes” and a “sexy pink sweater” (86), and is deemed by the other soldiers as no more than a happy distraction for her man. As Mary Anne settles in though, her abundant curiosity of Vietnam and the war heighten, and she soon enough possesses as much interest in the war as many of the men. Forward, Mary Anne’s transformation into a soldier begins as she leaves her sweet femininity behind. No longer caring for her vanity, she falls “into the habits of the bush. No cosmetics, no fingernail filing. She stopped wearing jewelry, [and] cut her hair short” (94). Mary Anne’s lost femininity is also evident when she handles powerful rifles like the M-16. Not only does the weapon literally scream out masculi...
When Mary Anne begins interacting with the land and the material culture of war we are introduced to her curious nature. She would “listen carefully” (91) and was intrigued by the land and its mystery. Vietnam was like Elroy Berdahl to her in the beginning in that it did not speak, it did not judge, it was simply there. Vietnam saved Mary Anne’s life. Like Elroy, “[Vietnam] was the t...