Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Poor Mary Anne
One of the many themes in The Things They Carried is the youthfulness of the soldiers. The first time this appears is in the first story, “The Things They Carried” when Lee Strunk has to crawl in the tunnel. Lieutenant Cross cross goes to inspect the tunnel and then his mind unwillingly wanders to thinking about Martha, the girl back home. O’Brien writes, “[Lieutenant Cross] could not bring himself to worry about matters of security. He was beyond that. He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn’t help it” (11). Here, O’Brien introduces the idea that many of the soldiers are not full-grown men and, perhaps, too young to be fighting this war. O’Brien does not hold Cross truly accountable for allowing himself to become distracted because he simply cannot help it. The theme of entering the war young and innocent is even more prevalent in the story, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”. Rat Kiley tells the story of when one of his fellow soldiers, Mark Fossie, flew his girlfriend, Mary Anne into Vietnam. Kiley finds it very important that people get the details to his story correct. For example, Kiley argues that he never called Mary Anne dumb, just young. The only thing different about her from the rest of them was that she was a girl. Kiley continues, “I mean, when we first got here -- all of us -- we were real young and innocent, full of romantic bullshit...” (93) This story is especially important in showing how the war changes people and corrupts that innocence. At the beginning of his story, Kiley makes a point to note how similar all of the soldiers were to Mary Anne and that she really was not different from them. As the story progresses, Mary Anne becomes more and more enthralled with the war. When the story ends, Mary Anne’s whereabouts are unknown, but there is suspicion that she “ had crossed over to the other side. She was part of the land” (110). Mary Anne’s initial innocence and naivety are representative of those of everyone before going to war. She is not dumb, she picks things up quickly. But Mary Anne literally gets lost in the war and never comes back, symbolic of how the soldiers lose part of themselves and their youthfulness to the war.
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Great blog Kathryn! I thought it was an interesting theme of youthfulness of the soldiers. It is true that the men recruited for this war were young with a lot of life headed for them. The story of "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" was an example of how war changed some of the men quickly. Mary Anne became so infatuated with every aspect of war and wanted to even eat the land and be part of it. She started going on ambushes and was part of the guys in just three weeks. War changed the mentality of the innocent.
ReplyDeleteInteresting post, Kathyrn. Indeed, youthfulness (innocence), and subsequently, the loss of youthfulness, is one of the prevalent themes in O'Brien's work. Besides Mary Anne, we also see how Rat Kiley losses his youthfulness. In "How to Tell a True War Story," we see that Rat Kiley loses his mind after a friend of his dies. We read that he writes a letter to his friend's sister about how great of a guy her brother was. The letter was "very personal and touching... Rat almost bawls writing it" (64). However, when he learns that his friend's sister never wrote back, he becomes incredibly upset and even calls her a "cooze." Another example that shows how Rat Kiley loses his innocence is when he gruesomely shoots and kills a baby water buffalo. Who in their right mind would do such a thing? With the lost of his best friend and his experiences as a soldier, we see that while Rat Kiley was only nineteen, his youthfulness was stripped away from him, and now he becomes a crude and violent person.
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