Professor Cline
English 102
3 October 2010
Summary vs. Analysis
For this essay, I chose “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” This story was told to Tim O’Brien, by his friend Rat Kiley. Rat and eight other soldiers were running this basic emergency station in the mountains near the village of Tra Bong. There were also six Green Berets that used the compound as their base. According to Rat, “The Greenies were not social animals, in fact they would vanish for days at a time, or even weeks, and then late at night they would just as magically reappear.” (92). the highest ranking soldier was Eddie Diamond, who had a thing for dope and Darvon. There was no such thing as military discipline in this compound.There is this young soldier, Mark Fossie, who sends his girlfriend money, and arranges a helicopter which brings her to the compound. Rat said, “This tall, big-boned blonde. At best she was seventeen years old. She had long white legs and blue eyes and a complexion like strawberry ice cream. Very friendly, too.” (93). The war intrigued Mary Anne Bell, one morning she talked Mark into taking her down to a nearby village, so she could get a feel for how other people lived. Mary Anne felt at home, the hostile territory didn’t seem to bother her at all. Over several weeks, Mary Anne fell into the habits of the bush, learning how to disassemble an M-16, and cutting her hair short which she wrapped in a green bandanna. Rat explained, “Twice, she came in late at night, and then finally she did not come in at all.” (99). Rat said that she disappeared for three weeks once, and then one night she and the Greenies came up the hill, drifted across the compound to the Special Forces bunker where she followed the others inside. The next day and night, Mark Fossie waited near the Special Forces area for Mary Anne, but she never came out of the bunker. Rat explained, “Fossie hit the door hard and it swung opened, across the room a dozen candles were burning, and the place seemed to echo with a weird deep-wilderness sound-tribal music. But what hit you first, was the smell. Two kinds of smells. There was a scent of incense, but beneath the smoke lay a deeper and much more powerful stench. It paralyzed your lungs, Rat said.” “On a post was a decayed head of a large black leopard; strips of yellow-brown skin dangled from the overhead rafters. And stacks of bones-all kinds. There was a poster that said: ASSEMBLE YOUR OWN GOOK!! FREE SAMPLE KIT!! Out of the shadows stepped Mary Anne, she gazed down at Fossie, almost blankly, and in the candlelight her face had the composure of someone perfectly at peace with herself. Rat said, “In part it was her eyes: utterly flat and indifferent. There was no emotion in her stare, no sense of person behind it. But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl’s throat was a necklace of human tongues. Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a copper wire, one overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrill syllable.” (111). Mary Ann told Rat and Fossie, “I want to eat this place. Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country-the dirt, the death- I just want to eat it and have it there inside me.” (111). Fossie stood rigid. “Do something,” he whispered. “I can’t just let her go like that.” Rat listened for a time, and then shook his head. “Man, you must be deaf. She’s already gone.”
So what happened to the Mary Anne Bell? She was young, fresh out of high school, but was she really the naïve, innocent girl from Cleveland. It’s possible that she didn’t understand the danger and severity of the Vietnam War. Maybe she was so curious, that the answers to her questions were not enough, so she had to experience the war for herself. Her boyfriend, Fossie wasn’t fighting, but the Greenies were and that peaked her interest. I believe that after she went out a few times with the Green Berets, there was no turning back. Mary Anne became addicted to the “adrenaline rush”, while she was out in the bush. She may have become addicted to opium also. After watching, and then participating in the slayings of the Vietnamese, I think, mentally she just lost it. Unfortunately when someone crosses over to that place in their mind, they are oblivious to it. It’s heartbreaking to think of the guilt that her boyfriend must have gone through, and the pain of watching her fade away, right before his eyes.
Works Cited
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