In the spring of 1938 my Grandma was born in poland. Around this time World War Two was less than a year away. This may seem unimportant because she was not in Germany but she was Jewish. And thing about that is, the Germans eventually invaded Poland. This forced her family to go into hiding, however, they saw a life for her. They wouldn’t want to raise a baby in an attic full of strangers and a crying baby would give away their hiding spot very easily. They gave her to a catgholic family who was their neighbor before they left Poland. For about 8 years she lived in Italy then in her teens, they moved to Australia.(keep this in mind, it’s important later) 16 years of her life, she didn’t know that these people were not her real family. When the war was over, her parents took a ship to Newyork City where they have our family name engraved on a wall of other survivors.

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My Grandma knew she was gonna go into fashion design when she was applying to colleges and her parents had been mailing her foster parents and she found out they were in Newyork City. She applied to Parsons and got accepted. When she moved there, she looked for the address on the letter. She had finally reunited with them. They were so proud of her. She eventually met my Grandpa in Newyork City as well. He was a Med School student.

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I’ve always loved my Grandma for our common interest in fashion. And I always thought it was so cool that she grew up during my favorite fashion time period (50’s/60’s). When I was little I lived in California and she lived in Florida so we didn’t visit often. But one time when I was probably 9 or 10 we visited during the summer. Her house was bought in the 70s and hadn’t really been …remodeled since… It is really cool looking though. 

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 Anyways! She had these really pretty flowers that I had never seen before. I asked what flower it was and she told me it was a pyrophate, a plant that can survive fires. It was one of the few plants that survived the austrailian wild fires. 

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It required all the elements to survive. Earth, Water, Air, and even Fire. It was a symbol of hope; that through all the fires it still survived. She connected that later in life that through everything she had been through, she was still alive.

In John H. Timmerman’s essay, “Tim O’Brien and the Art of the True War Story: Night March and Speaking of Courage,” he states that: “The Vietnam war story is not simply about the rise and fall of nations (South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, China, Thailand, the United States, and Soviet Union).  Rather, it is about the rise and fall of the dreams of individual soldiers—their hopes riddled by disillusionment, their fantasies broken by shrapnel-edged realities” (100).  I have to say that I agree with Timmerman that the Vietnam War was more than just about the war itself.  What the individual soldiers had to go through during the Vietnam War adds to the event.  You can learn all the facts about a certain historical event, but it is not until you hear a story from someone that was actually there that you can truly understand what it was like.

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Timmerman believes that O’Brien’s chapter, “Speaking of Courage,” “poses a fundamental distinction between the fact of what “actually” happened and the reality experience by the individual” (100).  I agree with Timmerman because it is in this chapter that readers can truly see the burden of having to be courageous can have on an individual.  In the chapter, “Speaking of Courage,” in The Things They Carried¸ O’Brien provides readers with a story that shows us the struggle soldiers may have faced postwar.  In “Speaking of Courage,” readers get to experience the postwar story of the character Norman Bowker.  In this chapter readers see that just like Tim O’Brien, Norman struggles with deciding if his actions during the war were courageous or cowardly.  Was he a hero for his actions or a coward?

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For the most part it seems that Norman was quite a courageous soldier while he was serving in Vietnam.  However, it was one particular event, the death of his combat member Kiowa that made him deliberate his actions while in Vietnam.  Norman even states that he felt he was not brave at this particular moment: “well, this one time, this one night out by the river…I wasn’t very brave” (O’Brien 136).  It seems that Norman is struggling with grief and confusion because he knows that he could have been braver and perhaps be able to save his friend’s life.  In a way Norman was courageous because he reacted when he saw Kiowa slipping away in the muck instead of just standing by thinking someone else who save Kiowa.

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As soon as Norman saw Kiowa sinking into the muck he grabbed him by the boot and tried his best to pull him out.  But, as soon as he saw there was no hope and Kiowa was lost, Norman let go of him in order to save himself from sinking deeper into the muck.  Norman thinks he was as brave as he could have been, but even that much bravery was not enough to save Kiowa from slipping away into the muck.

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It seems that Norman is struggling with this particular moment because he knows in his heart that he did not freak and he could have saved Kiowa if things had just went his way.  “I didn’t flip out, he would’ve said.  I was cool.  If things had gone right, if it hadn’t been for that smell, I could’ve won the Silver Star” (O’Brien 143).  Norman blames the smell of the muck for getting in the way of his bravery.  If it was not for the smell Norman feels he could have saved Kiowa and earned the Sliver Star.  I find it strange that Norman blames the smell for not being able save his friend.  I mean, if Norman truly was courageous he would have been able to get pass the smell and save Kiowa.  To mean someone who is courageous would do whatever they could in order to succeed.  A courageous solider would have been able to see pass the horrible smell and saved Kiowa.  Perhaps this is why Norman struggles with his bravery at this moment because he too knows that a courageous solider would have not let the horrible smell get in the way of saving a fellow combat. I think Timmerman sums this idea up nicely when he says, “what people would have heard, if only they had listened, was Norman Bowker’s story of how he had courage, of how he almost saved his friends Kiowa, expect for the terrible stink of the shitfield” (108).  Yes, Norman was courageous for acting and trying to save Kiowa, but all anyone is going to listen to is how he was not able to because of the smell.  Norman is going to be viewed as a coward because he let a smell get in the way.  So in the end was Norman a hero or a coward?  I feel it could go either way some may say he was a coward while others may see him as a hero.  I think he was both.  Norman was a hero for trying to save Kiowa but he was also a coward because he let the smell get in the way of his heroic actions.  Because I feel if he was truly courageous he would have been able to get pass the horrible smell and saved Kiowa.

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Chapter Background

A young medic named Mark Fossie didn’t see why he shouldn’t import in his American girlfriend instead. The girl turned up six weeks later on a helicopter delivering supplies. She was blonde and young, wearing a pink sweater and culottes, and her name was Mary Anne. She was mildly flirtatious and all around rather good for morale, says Kiley. Mary Anne was curious about the natives, and about the war. In her first few weeks in Vietnam, she learned how to use a gun, she helped patch up the injured, she stopped wearing makeup, and she arranged a sightseeing trip of sorts to the nearest village. She thought the enemy couldn’t be so bad. “They’re human beings,” she reasoned, “aren’t they? Like everybody else?” (92).

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But she quickly got restless and kept staring at the hills. Finally, she disappeared again. Fossie set off to find her and burst into the Green Beret encampment, where he heard Mary Anne singing. There was a terrible stink and the bones of dead Vietnamese soldiers were lying around the tent. There was a leopard skin hanging from the roof. Mary Anne was wearing her culottes and, as Fossie drew closer, he saw that she was wearing a necklace made of human tongues. Mary Anne told her fiancée he didn’t belong in the tent. She said she felt like herself for the first time in her life. She pleaded with Fossie to understand, saying: “it isn’t bad.”

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Kiley left Song Tra Bong shortly thereafter. As he tells the story, he says he was partly in love with Mary Anne, and that all of the troops were. He heard about Mary Anne again later from some friends. Her love of Vietnam had only increased — until she finally went off into the mountains by herself. She is still out there, he says, “ready to kill.”

Analysis

They Things They Carried is mostly devoid of women. Women exist only on the margins of the narrative. They are scarcely remembered girlfriends, or they are beloved girlfriends who are only present in photographs. They are distant objects of sexual longing: Japanese or Red Cross nurses, Jane Fonda in a movie. “The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong” is the only story in which a female character is the protagonist. Even then, the woman’s own sensibility remains a mystery. Her narrative is filtered through a man’s (Rat Kiley’s) retelling.

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The lesson to be drawn from Mary Anne’s story is that the war affects women exactly the same way it does men. Women, too, can be driven mad. In this story, the madness takes the form of a transformation from one familiar literary stock figure to another: the innocent Madonna figure to the sexy seductress. Not only does Mary Anne become a killer, but she also becomes a sexually empowered/liberated.

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In her sexy sweater and innocent pants-skirt combination, no one could seem more innocent, or more American than Mary Anne. In the beginning of the story, she is something recognizable to both the soldiers and the reader: a normal American girl who wants a family. The story of her mutation into something foreign, a killer, mirrors the transformation of all of the soldiers. They go to war as boys and return from war as killers.

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Before Mary Anne’s transformation in complete, she begins blurring the line of recognizable gender roles. She stops showering, covers her feminine long hair, and stops wearing makeup. She is transformed into a mannish figure and she enjoys the transformation. The soldiers are horrified and titillated by her transformation. Mary Anne may have stopped thinking of herself as a woman, but she does not wholly kill her sexual appeal. Even, or especially, after mutating into something almost unrecognizable, a mixture of the femme fatale and the killer, she remains sexually desirable, even lovable. Riley claims: “We were all in love with her.”

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