Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong Tim O’Brien

In this story, O’Brien paints a highly stylized version of Vietnam as a world that profoundly affects the foreign Americans who inhabit it. Stylize : depict or treat in a mannered and nonrealistic style.

Tim O’Brien portrays a stark difference between the native world of Vietnam and the world of the Americans. Mary Anne Bell fully embraces Vietnamese culture, while Mark Fossie ignores it.

The difference between their experiences sets up a world in which the separate cultures are completely foreign to, and incompatible with, each other. O’Brien does not suggest that one can assimilate elements of each culture into a comfortable mix. Rather, the characters must choose a single cultural identity.

“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” rejects the idea of women as one- dimensional beings who serve only to offer comfort to men. Fossie assumes that if he brings Mary Anne over to the relatively comfortable quarters he and his men keep, he will gain her comfort and companionship and she will remain unaffected by her surroundings.

This fantasy is immediately shattered as Mary Anne is instantly curious about the things surrounding her —from the language and the locals to the ammunition and the procedures and finally the nature of war itself.

The irony of this story is that Mary Anne’s new reality agrees with her, perhaps more than her conventional life. She is enlivened and empowered by war: its influence prompts her to make plans for future travel and to attempt to steer her path away from the life she earlier considered desirable.

Ironically, although her soldier boyfriend brings her over to be a comfort while he is in the midst of war, in the end, Mary Anne’s conversion makes her hungrier for adventure than he is.

Mark Fossie tries to understand Mary Anne by transferring the values and power structure of their native Cleveland Heights to Vietnam, but the foreign culture renders his method of interpreting her behavior meaningless.

Mary Anne herself becomes a component of the foreign Vietnam, inexplicable to Fossie, who remains an outsider.

Mary Anne falls in love with Vietnam, embracing the jungle, which is mysterious to the soldiers. She handles the uncertainty of war differently than Fossie and the others. Her feeling that she has nothing to lose saves further oppression back in Ohio and allows her to avoid a life of inevitabilities, and she joins the Green Berets to break out of a prison of gender norms.

Mary Anne’s tongue necklace represents her desire to be a part of Vietnamese culture. The tongues symbolize consumption, both literally and figuratively.

Mary Anne is willing to be consumed by the jungle and to become a consumer of Vietnamese culture. Embraced by the tongues and surrounded by other tribal symbols, Mary Anne defends herself against Fossie’s horror and condemnation.

Mary Anne makes a distinction between those like Fossie and his fellow soldiers who are present in Vietnam because they have to be and those like herself and her newfound friends who have a greater respect for the land. She has grown fearless and accepting, because she has resigned herself to the fact that Vietnam will consume her.

Storytelling  By giving the narrator his own name and naming the rest of his characters after the men he actually fought alongside in the Vietnam War, O’Brien blurs the distinction between fact and fiction.  The result is that it is impossible to know whether or not any given event in the stories truly happened to O’Brien.

Storytelling  He intentionally heightens this impossibility when his characters contradict themselves several times in the collection of stories, rendering the truth of any statement suspect.  O’Brien’s aim in blending fact and fiction is to make the point that objective truth of a war story is less relevant than the act of telling a story.

Storytelling  O’Brien is attempting not to write a history of the Vietnam War through his stories but rather to explore the ways that speaking about war experience establishes or fails to establish bonds between a soldier and his audience.

Storytelling  The technical facts surrounding any individual event are less important than the overarching, subjective truth of what the war meant to soldiers and how it changed them.

 Consider the following statements:  “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” is a true story.  This actually happened.  No soldier ever shipped his girlfriend over to Vietnam during the war.  Rat Kiley, Mark Fossey, Mary Anne Bell, and even O’Brien’s narrator are all fictions – they are inventions of O’Brien’s imagination  How can all of these statements possibly be simultaneously true?  For starters, it’s important to acknowledge that Mary Anne Bell does not exist. She never did. Rather, she is a device O’Brien uses to express his truth.