Things They Carried Mary Anne

¶ … Things They Carried

Mary Anne is significant to the novel because O'Brien demonstrates how the war impacts more than soliders. In the "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," Mary Anne is the epitome of the all- American girl. Once seeing war, she becomes obsessed with it. It literally consumes her and theend of sth story, the girl that arrived in Vietnam was a distant memory. Marry Anne meets the soldiers as a sweet girl dressed in "culottes and this sexy pink sweater" (102). She transforms into a creature that shocks even the soldiers.For exaple, she goes on outings through the "ville" (109) and learns to shoot an M-16. She also become skilled at the "habits of the bush" (110) and quietly disappears with Green Berets and performs ambushes alongside them. Her old identity becomes a "small, soft shadow" (115) as everyone around her realizes she was the "same person no more" (116-17). The most compelling aspect of her transformation occurs when she says:

Sometimes I want to eat this place. . . . it's like ... this appetite . . . When I'm out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing in the dark -- I'm on fire almost -- I'm burning away into nothing -- but it doesn't matter because I know exactly who I am. (121)

This passage represents a loss of innocence. Mary Anne slips into the dark forest never to be heard from again. She does not simply go away for awhile, she disappears completely. Through her, O'Brien illustrates the strange, hypnotic affect war has on certain individuals. It is powerful and not to be underestimated.

O'Brien illustrates the wide array of emotions experienced during war with "Ambush" and "The Man I Killed." Emotions and perspectives of war and death change with exposure to war and death. In "Ambush," war and death seem casual as the speaker tells us how the sees the young man walking and pills the pin on the grenade because he was afraid. He writes, "I did not hate the young man: I did not see him as the enemy" (132). The image before him on the trail is something vague, like a part of the morning fog but the soldier's instincts kick in before he has time to think. He kills the man without even thinking about it because he was "afraid of something" (131). In "The Man I Killed," the death of the enemy is suffocating because it is so shocking. To have killed a man is more than the soldier can bear. In "Ambush," things change as acts of war become automatic as demonstrated when the speaker admits the matter is not a "matter of live or die" (133). It simply is and there is no reason behind it. In "The Man I Killed," nothing is automatic; the speaker is frozen, thinking of the dead man's life. He images the act of fighting "frightened him. He was not a fighter. His health was poor, his body small and frail. He liked books. He wanted someday to be a teacher. He hoped that Americans would go away" (125). The dead man in "Ambush" "would've died anyway" (133) while the dead man in "The Man I Killed" "could not make himself fight" (127). These images illustrate how living with enough of war can change one's perceptions. The speaker demonstrates how the human psyche hardens to the war as a coping machanism.