Week 7 Open Topic

The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong was a particularly interesting story within Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. At face value, the story is about a young girl who visits her boyfriend in Vietnam and progressively becomes more and more fascinated with the entire experience of the war. However, I believe the transformation of Mary Anne is also symbolic of the transformation that many of the soldiers in Vietnam underwent. She steps off the plane, wearing her pink sweater and white culottes as if she is stepping off the bus into her first day of high school (90). This is very similar to the boys going off to war; they are far from home and not ready to leave behind their safety blankets. I imagine they look just as innocent and inexperienced as she did, overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of their current situation. However, as humans are made to do, they evolve, learn the land, learn the sounds of the war, and begin embracing the experience of fighting. Mary Anne, in particular, takes interest in her surroundings, extremely curious about every nuance of the war and the countryside. She visits the village, learns how to use the weapons, and eventually goes on an ambush with the Greenies (98). This parallels the hunger for fighting that some of the soldiers develop, even though there are those who are still very ready to go back home. These natural warriors, however, don’t seem to care why they are fighting, they have simply learned that the rules of the game are kill the enemy, no further questions asked. I believe this is the point of no return, the point at which the human soul has been so significantly transformed that it can no longer return to the normalcy of the previous lifestyle. O’Brien illustrates this concept through they breakdown of Mary Anne’s relationship with Mark. He asks her to marry him, plans to send her back home to wait for him, and then she escapes because she is not capable of recapturing her former self (103-105, 112). This is a very interesting way to present an explanation of the reasons it is so difficult for some soldiers to reintegrate into society. They are at a severe evolutionary disadvantage because they are trained to fight like machines and then expected to simply slip back into their normal lives. This is yet another example of a hardship of war. “You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it’s never the same” (114).