The chapter Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong is a little bit different than most of the chapters. It is about the story of the girl Mary Ann, and how she transformed from a sweet young high school girl to a killer that wears human tounges as jewelry. Throughout the chapter, we see this progression of Mary Ann into the killer that she ended up becoming.
As Rat tells this story to the rest of the platoon, nobody believes him because the change is so Jurassic and It doesn’t make sense. There is only one cause of the transformation, and that is the war itself. The war will not just do physical damage, but also phycological. I think that Mary Ann’s case is very similar to a case that we are 100% sure that happened and that is the case of Phineas Gage. Gage was working on a railroad when suddenly there was something that caused a large metal rod to impale him through the brain and up through the skull. He miracles lived, but the people who were close to him said that he was not himself, he was more violent and was angered extremely easily.
Now Mary Ann did not have a metal rod impale her, but in a way she did. It may not be visible to the human eye but the war (the metal rod) directly changed how she was. She started off as a sweet king young lady, and the war turned her into a killer, who cared about no one and had no emotions. I think that most of the soldiers who have experienced wars have something like this, maybe not to the extremes of Marry Ann and the war being a metal rod, but more like the war being a parasite, Constantly on the minds of our veterans, nibbling away at their sanity.
We can see this parasite in O’Brien in the next chapter called “The Man I Killed”. This chapter, it repeatedly states about the possibilities that the young Vietnamese man would have had in his life and that he was not solider, but just a kid, and how he was afraid of something, not necessarily the thin young Vietnamese solider, but something further off in the distance. I believe that the fear the O’Brien is talking about is the effect of war on the human mind, and how it changes how people, think, act, and talk.
When the subject of war is brought up the first thing that pops into your head is guns and death, but something that not many people talk about let alone know about is how spending two years of your life always scared alway unsure if today will be your last has on the human mind.