The Things They Carried is a collection of metafiction short stories written in 1990 by Tim O’Brien. It was about a platoon fighting in the Vietnam War, in the book he talks about his experiences as a soldier. In one of his stories “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” he talks about how Mary Anne, Mark Fossies girlfriend, transformed into a different person. In this essay, I’m going to be talking about if the transformation was human nature, and whether would it be different if she was a man, as well as what I think happened to her at the end.
At first, Mary Anne came to the war to see her boyfriend Mark Fossie. Mary and Mark had been sweethearts since grammar school, since sixth grade they had known that one day they would marry, and live in a house near Lake Erie, with their three healthy yellow-haired children; they wanted to grow old together and die in each other’s arms; they even wanted to be buried in the same walnut basket. They deeply loved each other. Rat Kiley said, 'They were very much in love, full of dreams, and in the ordinary flow of their lives the whole scenario might well have come true.” Mary Anne came to Vietnam as an innocent, friendly, pretty young girl, but Mary is curious and a fast learner- she learns some of the language and learns how to cook, and then learns how to shoot a weapon. When four casualties come in, she is not afraid to tend to them, learning how to patch up wounds and how to shoot morphine. Mary Anne drops all her fussy feminine habits and cuts her hair short. One day she went on an ambush and met the “greenies,” when she came back Mark suggested it was time for her to go home. She didn’t like the idea and becomes withdrawn. She eventually disappears. A couple of days later, she’s lying in a scary, cave-like hut and she’s singing weird high music and wearing a necklace made of human tongues. Something went down in her head, and it is not human nature, because human nature is: the general psychological characteristics, feelings, and behavioral traits of humankind, regarded as shared by all humans. And what Mary Anne goes through is not shared by all humans, Mary Anne changes in her physical and psychological characteristics from the civilized and innocent girl she once was into a ruthless and barbaric woman.
When Mary Anne first came to the camp, she was a nice and pretty girl, Rat Kiley explained her as “A tall, big-boned blonde. At best, Rat said, she was seventeen years old, fresh out of Cleveland Heights Senior High. She had long white legs and blue eyes and a complexion like strawberry ice cream. Very friendly, too.” Mary Anne's surroundings changed her, she transformed from a pretty girl wearing a pink sweater and culottes to an animal-like hunter who wears a necklace of tongues, she goes through and exaggerates the change all young men went through in Vietnam. The way Mary Anne transformed is not human nature, but if she was a man that wouldn’t be different because the war changes people no matter what gender they are; O’Brien comes to Vietnam twenty years later after the war, and still can’t get over the things that happened, such as his first kill with a grenade, or when the soldiers burned down a village and a girl was dancing outside her burning house. This shows that the war can change both males and females, anyone would change, maybe not as much as Mary Anne have, but still enough to mess with their mind and make them a bit crazy.
One night after she returns from her three-week disappearance, her eyes were not blue, but rather a bright glowing jungle green, those of a person who has been in the jungle for a while. She has completed her transformation into this violent and ruthless woman and her eyes show this. She was deep in the jungle and was connected to the land. The smell in the room that she was sitting in is described by Rat Kiley as “like an animal's den, a mix of blood and scorched hair and excrement and the sweet-sour odor of moldering flesh-the stink of the kill.” Mary Anne isn’t the person she used to be, she mixed with the Greenies and didn’t want to leave, she said “I feel close to myself. 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. You can't feel like that anywhere else.” There was nothing for Mark Fossie at that moment to do, She was already gone. She stayed with the Greenies a while after, taking greedy pleasure in night patrols, she was good at it, and she liked it. All camouflaged up, barefoot, and with no weapon. Then one day, all alone, she walked off into the mountains and never came back. Nobody, no equipment, and no clothing were found. The story of her doesn’t end there tho, though The Greenies told Rat Kiley that, “Mary Anne was still somewhere out there in the dark. Odd movements, odd shapes. Late at night, when the Greenies were out on ambush, the whole rain forest seemed to stare in at them—a watched feeling—and a couple of times they almost saw her sliding through the shadows. Not quite, but almost. 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.” I think Mary Anne was still alive, stalking the Greenies and the soldiers, she was connected to the land tho, not the old Mary, but a wild barbaric Mary.