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Natally Diaz
Professor Lauryn Wingate
English 113 B
March 31, 2014
Mary Anne Bell
In the book, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, the war takes American
youth and purity away from the person and corrupts it, leaving a series of teenage killing
machines. Mary Anne is a teenage girl that is in love with Mark Fossie. They talk of
marriage and their life together up to the time she arrives to Vietnam. Mary Anne plans to
visit Fossie in Vietnam but instead ends up staying so he smuggles her into town bringing
her in a helicopter. Her natural curiosity is what catches her initial reaction into Vietnam,
and of course, she wants to be with Fossie as well. Mary Ann begins with her pink sweater
and culottes. She was described to as a beautiful, young, innocent girl from all of Fossie’s
companions. As she begins to learn how to clam arteries and assemble rifles whereas
getting more affiliated with the country of Vietnam, she starts to lose the innocence that
Mark Fossie once loved and cherished about her.
Vietnam changed Mary Anne greatly. She went from being the sweet girl that
everybody likes to somebody people hardly know. Getting caught up in the war of
Vietnam, her priorities began to change. Her opinions on getting married changed. She first
wanted to get married right after Fossie got out of service but now she wants to wait as
much as she can. She also starts to wear less makeup and becomes a rebel when Mary
Anne decides to go on an ambush with the Green Berets. This is actually something that a
lot of the soldiers don’t ever imagine doing. Mary Anne tries to take a peak into the bad
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side. Fossie is disturbed and worried by this. Fossie is so preoccupied with the fact that she
gone and even thinks that she’s sleeping around. “Even in the dim light it was clear that the
boy was in trouble. There were dark smudges under his eyes, the frayed edges of somebody
who hadn’t slept in a while” (O’Brien 100). Mark Fossie is still in love with Mary Anne.
And even if she didn’t cheat on him as Fossie initially thought, he still shows a care and
compassion for her and wants the old Mary Anne back. When Mary Ann returns she looks
exhausted. She has a charcoal color skin tone and branches all over her head and body.
Mark Fossie was furious and demands to have a conversation with Mary Anne who refuses.
Fossie is so disturbed, that he does not take no for an answer. What happened between
them, nobody really knows. However, we do know that they made a compromise, “I’ll put
it this way— we’re officially engaged” (O’Brien 103). Mark Fossie has stud up for himself
and demanded a compromise to try to save the love of his life.
Once at war, everything changes, your state of mind, the way you think, and even
your wardrobe. You’re not that fun loving person in Vietnam that you would be in the real
world. According to the National Center for PTSD, “it can occur after you have been
through a trauma. During this type of event, you think that your life or others' lives are in
danger. You may feel afraid or think that you have no control over what is happening”
(Veterans Affairs). Many people that experience trauma feel lonely and they just feel so
lost with themselves. This disease has become so big that people have to seek treatment for
it. “About 7 or 8 out of every 100 people (or 7-8% of the population) will have PTSD at
some point in their lives and about 5.2 million adults have PTSD during a given year. This
is only a small portion of those who have gone through a trauma” (Veterans Affairs).
Going to war makes you value things so much more. Mark Fossie values Mary Anne so
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much that he is willing to do anything to get her back. And it seemed to work because he
got Mary Anne to become the person she used to be, at least for a little bit. War also
changed almost every soldier mentally. They came to war looking to become tough men
but came out more emotionally unstable than ever. Your mindset changes and you feel like
you are all alone, and yet when they come home they try to act the same way. Even if you
are in civilization, your natural instincts still affect you. War can change you into an animal
that only has one incentive: to kill.
Mary Ann has begun to find the middle ground in Vietnam. She went from being
that All-American teenage girl that we all loved to a “true war soldier.” She loved the war
and embraced ever minute of it. She was still wearing her culottes from when she first
arrived, but also wears a nasty looking tongue necklace. This shows the merging of the two
characters. Her culottes symbolize the Mary Ann that she was when she first arrived to
Vietnam and the tongue necklace symbolizes the person she has now become. She has
transformed, but in a sense is still herself. Her appetite for war becomes greater and she
can’t get over the excitement of Vietnam. Many people have obsessions and things that
they cant live without; like drug. This so happens to be Mary Anne’s novacaine. War is the
only place that makes her feel like she is alive and she thinks she has found her place on
Earth. “She wanted to be a part of the land and be completely lost in it, like she had already
become lost in herself” (LitCharts). She had achieved her goal in becoming a part of the
land but it swallowed her whole instead of the other way around. Mary Ann was now lost.
She did not know who she was or she wants to become.
In the article, “Mary Anne’s progression from a sweet girlfriend to something
more bestial than the Green Berets is an analogy for the loss of innocence through which
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all soldiers of Vietnam go” (Houghton). Mary Anne’s innocence disappeared. She was so
lost into the war that she eventually lost her whole self. All of the men sent out to Vietnam
left their innocence and baggage on the grounds of a foreign country. “For Mary Anne, the
presence of her sweetheart gave her moments of pause in her transformation, where she
took occasional steps back into sweetness” (Houghton). Mark Fossie tried so hard to get his
Mary Anne back that he loved so badly but she was far too lost in his eyes. Even though
Mary Ann was changing, she still had occasional moments of innocence. When Mary Anne
agreed to get married to Fossie, she was a so-called “good girl.” When the guys tried to talk
to her she would not respond, and if she did she would just give very blank answers. In my
opinion, Mary Anne was confused because she was losing the kife that she now wants:
Vietnam. Even though people think she was completely lost, Mary Anne was just confused.
She did not know what she wanted in that very moment which explains her moment of
silence. She was so lost with herself that she did not how to even react. However, just like
all of the men in the battlefields, their acts of innocent selves will never be seen again
because of all the things they have done and the decisions they have made. This cause is
because of war and it is just one example of how war can change your way of thinking.
Mary Anne had a different view of herself. She does not think that she is dark like
how the others perceive her to be. To her it is about a woman that is trying to overcome
gender roles and the failure of men accepting it. Vietnam empowered Mary Anne and gave
her a personality that the men could not understand because they began to see Mary Ann as
corrupt; she was just doing what men have always done. Mark was unable to comprehend
this as well and this is initially what destroyed their relationship. He could also not accept
Mary Anne breaking from that defined gender role of women at the time and the
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relationship had to end. “You got theses binders on about women. How gentle and peaceful
they are. All of that crap about how if we had a pussy for president there wouldn’t be no
more wars. Pure garbage. You got to get rid of that sexist attitude” (O’brien 107). Rat Kiley
goes on to point out that sexism is wrong and that woman can be just as dark as men
because of the war. Mary Anne is trying to liberate herself and find her true identity. When
you are young, we always think that we have the right answers. This applies to Mary Anne
because when she first arrived in Vietnam, she knew exactly what she wanted. She knew
that she was going to marry Fossie and start a life with him as fast as she could. Mary Anne
was 17, young and innocent. She didn’t know what she wanted because she thought that wa
the best in life that she could get. When Mary Anne went trough this experience she saw
another side of life. She saw another opportunity that she never thought was possible
before. And she so happened to like this way of life even better. So when all of the people
said that Mary Anne was “young and innocent,” maybe the doubting soldiers were just
being judgmental because of how they perceive woman to be.
Vietnam was the motherland of change. Mary Anne changed into a person almost
unrecognizable. But what if this is what Mary has always wanted and just didn’t know it
yet? When we look at a person, we just analyze them as how we first met them. This was a
prime example of the kind of change Mary Anne went through. However, with Tim
O’brien being the narrator he tells it as a loss of innocence. Mary Anne is a character from
the suburbs, a high school sweetheart and a woman that personifies innocence to the
soldiers. The progression from the sweet girlfriend she was to something more repulsive
than the Green Berets is like an analogy for the loss of innocence through which all of the
soldiers in Vietnam go through.
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Works Cited
"The Things They Carried: Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong."
Litcharts.com. N.p., 24 Feb. 2010. Web. 01 Apr. 2014.
"The Things They Carried." The Things They Carried: Character
Analysis. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 5 July 2013. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.
"PTSD: National Center for PTSD." How Common Is PTSD? -. U.S Department of
Veterans Affairs, 30 Jan. 2014. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.