When you think of war, what do you think about? Do you think of the violence and the bloodshed of the soldiers who risked their lives for us, our freedom? Do you think of the survivors to come back home with PTSD? War is something you can never come back from. You see things, you do things, you hear things, things no one should ever have to go through. War can cause anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, mental illness, depression. Soldiers coming back from war are almost never the same person they were before they left for the war.
Mary Anne in The Things They Carry is shown to have changed. She went to this blonde bubbly seventeen-year-old girl who went to Vietnam to see her boyfriend to this bloodthirsty greenie. Before she became a completely different person she started to change slowly by distancing herself from her boyfriend to staying out late at night, to not going back to where she’s supposed to sleep. When she went to Vietnam, she had no intention of becoming the person she had become after a few weeks there. At the beginning of chapter nine, it states that Mary Anne was a beautiful young girl, with blue eyes, a pink sweater, and white culottes and at the end of the chapter it states that she was wearing the same thing but, had a necklace full of human tongues wrapped around her neck. She shows a lot of character development. The war changed Mary Anne and she became so obsessed with the war that it is said that she had “crossed over to the other side and became a part of the land.”. The longer Mary Anne was there, the more her mentality in the war changed her for the worse
Nobody knows everyone’s specific outcome of the war will be. One thing for certain is that the aftereffects of the war. And the effects do not only affect the soldier, but it may also affect one’s family or the people closest or around them. When Mary Anne started to change it didn’t just affect her it affected her boyfriend as well. She became distant from him. When we started to learn about her character development it was pretty obvious that her and her boyfriend weren’t going to be together much longer. It really didn’t come as a shock. In the end, he lost Mary Anne Belle to the land.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/suicide-risk-rises-quick-repeat-deployments-study-shows-n867221
