reflection on The Things They Carried p. 86-161

There is so much jam-packed into this novel… so many things I would love to discuss and analyze… so many chapters and glimpses of the human soul, but I cannot discuss it all. I could do a small overview of each chapter, as I did in my last reflection, but I don’t intend to do that. Right now I want to focus on the “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.”

Mary Anne, a girl from Cleveland Heights, a girl from the east side of Cleveland… a girl my age, a girl that grew up in a city by mine… a girl who went to Vietnam wearing a pink sweater and culottes. That in itself is the most unrealistic part of the novel… a girlfriend being shipped over to ‘Nam. In fact, that one fact is the only unrealistic part about it. And the story of a girl from Cleveland Heights? The story of that girl become one with Vietnam? That is too real for words.

I guess what makes her so powerful is the fact that she likes what she has found within herself. She appreciates these instincts that have been buried in her short life back home… in America… in Ohio… in Cleveland Heights. Vietnam took that extreme… that innocence in culottes… and it ripped it inside out to the other extreme. The men who fought and existed around her (save the Green Berets) were affect – oh yes – but it wasn’t quite the same. They tried to dissociate themselves from the reality of the war… they joke… they have fun… after all the men she’s with really aren’t in the middle of all of the fighting. Nevertheless, they’ve seen it, and if they haven’t yet, they will. It was in the air.

Mary Anne became something/someone else. I can’t say I blame Mark Fossie for not understanding, not knowing what she knew. I can’t say I blame any of them for thinking of the Green Berets and the new Mary Anne as evil… pink sweater, culottes, tongues and all. But I’m not sure it was evil. At least she didn’t think it was evil. In a way, becoming part of the land was dissociation as well.

Some might argue that what happened was believable, but only for a man. (If you can consider 19-year-old boys men…) Those people are wrong, plain and simply. She said she found something in herself… something she loved… perhaps that is the same thing that society so often pushes deep within women. Women didn’t fight back home… women didn’t put on camouflage and go camping behind the house… the men had these opportunities – in that way they were less susceptible to such a drastic change – but for Mary Anne, it was all new. She was just as young as the soldiers – younger, in fact. Same maturity at the beginning, perhaps, but they were all on the same level. Vietnam wasn’t about who was male and who was female – Vietnam took whatever it was given – the wilderness, the jungle, the night took Mary Anne. And Mary Anne took the night.

This story is what I would consider the “Heart of Darkness” of O’Brien’s novel. Of course, I hated Heart of Darkness, but O’Brien wrote it so much better. I think of Apocalypse Now, I think of Heart of Darkness, I think of Mary Anne in culottes.