Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

                What transformed Mary Anne into a killer was her curiosity. She wanted to learn more about the war and experience more about the war, and at the same time the environment she was living in also rubbed on her. Not only did she start learning from the soldiers, but she learned from Vietnam itself, and slowly started being consumed into a different life. It didn’t matter that Mary Anne was a woman because the story itself shows that the effects of war on women are the same as men. The difference was that the soldiers were forced against their will to be in such horrible place, but Mary Anne could have said no to Fossie. Because she was there for a different reason, Mary Anne was standing in a different position to that of the soldiers, but the effect of the war turned out to be the same. There can be different levels of this effect, but it’s not like it will only change men. Mary Anne arrives being the innocent American girl and gets transformed into a killer, just like when the soldiers arrive as boys and get changed into something different than their old selves. This story shows how the war can affect anyone who has been touched by it, regardless of their gender and their involvement in it.

                O’Brien lets Rat Kiley narrate the story because it doesn’t matter if the facts are what’s true, what matters is if the message and feelings the story teller is trying to communicate is true. The way Kiley tells it might not entirely fit into O’Brien’s criteria for telling a war story because Kiley does break the flow of it to insert his own interpretations of it, but in the end the message is what he was trying to get to: war is war, once you’re touched by it there’s no going back, whether you are a girl or a boy, afraid or curious.