The Things We Carried Literary Analysis

Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

The sixties in America were the age of youth and change, as around sixty million children from the post-war baby boom became teenagers and young adults. People began to move away from the conservative fifties and demand changes in education, values, lifestyles, laws and entertainment. The civil rights movement was spreading through out the United States during this time, as African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities demanded their rights. Overall change was sweeping through the nation as youth predominated the culture and this generation gap turned into a phenomenon. The Vietnam War was being fought during the sixties but the general population did not know much of what was going on in Vietnam. As the youth began to get draft notices, college campuses became centers of debate and stages for protest about the Vietnam War as the anti-war movement began. Tim O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried after serving in Vietnam, as a way for him to tell his war stories. The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong is one of the short stories within the book The Things They Carried, where one of the soldiers, Rat Kiley, tells the story of soldier Mark Fossie and his sweetheart, Mary Anne.

Mark Fossie flies Mary Anne over to Vietnam from America, and when she arrives, the men see her as a typical American girl, “this cute blonde” who “shows up with a suitcase and one of those plastic cosmetic bags” (90). The first time she meets the guys in the unit she is wearing “white culottes and this sexy pink sweater” (90). Fossie brings Mary Anne to Vietnam so she could comfort him and keep him company, but he never gave thought to the idea that she might be affected by her experiences in Vietnam. She is immediately “curious about things” (95) in her new surroundings. “What exactly was a trip flare? How did a Claymore work?” (95). She asks many questions and she began to embrace Vietnamese culture, “picking up little phrases of Vietnamese, learning how...