The Song Tra Bong

                Mary Anne comes to the war as an innocent and sweat girl that is in love with Mark Fossie, a war paramedic in a camp. While the story evolves we learn that the more time she spends in Vietnam the more she changes. She was very refined and she becomes part of Vietnam and very savage, worse than a soldier. She becomes a killer and we know this because she has a necklace which is full of human tongues and she helped in an ambush with the Special Forces. She becomes a killer because all the gore and the war lured her in because it was interesting. She wanted to know more about the war and about Vietnam until she became Vietnam, cold, killer, evil, always doing the opposite you think it is going to do, and she becomes an animal. The main reason why the character that goes through a change is a woman is because it shows how grave the situation is. Also in the time period that war took place people were very sexist and for them the idea of having women in war was considered stupid. Woman are said to be more mellow and less violent which really shows how much Vietnam may change a person—a women to a monster. Also in the past there was a belief that if a woman was a president she will be against war because it was said that women didn’t believe in killing or will never allow violence. This story goes completely against that tradition, showing the opinion of O’Brian that sexism is stupid.

                Rat Kiley is the narrator of this story because it is very likely that if the character O’Brian said the story, the reader will believe that the story is just the reflection of the author’s opinion (author also called O’Brian).  The story told by Rat fits the criteria of if it is a true war story because it is hard to separate what happened to what seemed to happen. Many things in the story can be seen in another way. An example is the disappearance of Mary Anne. All we know is that she was never seen again. What we think happened is that she became part of Vietnam and is walking around the forest, but she could have also been killed. Things like this and many other lead me to think that “Sweetheart in the Song Tra Bong” is a true war story.