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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