Sweetheart Of The Song Tra Bong Analysis

Continuing on the novel, O’Brien continues on talking about his memories and revealing some of his war memories to the readers, such as, the “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” is a love story between an American girl and an American soldier in Vietnam. Because of the significance of the American girl whose name was Mary Anne, he travelled down to see his lover, who was described as, “clean and innocent”. It implies that they did not know anything about the war and did not see the terrifying parts of the war. Both the words “clean” and “innocent” denote free from the dirt of the society, connoting immature and blameless. The author uses Mary Anne as an example to delineate how the people at home saw the soldiers. Moreover, O’Brien says, “they’ll

never understand any of this” that people at home often did not experience the same things that were happening to the soldiers at the war. The phrase “billion years” provokes a dramatic tone towards the audiences as if the idea of the two worlds between peace and war is forever an everlasting subject to those who are not involved in the war like the soldiers. Furthermore, on this note, the author is kind of uncovering how the general population usually feel out of place because they do not understand the soldiers and accept the war.

In my opinion, with the knowledge from my history class and some of the movies that I have watched, I see that this is often true in a war, and there is kind of a misunderstanding between those who live in the war, like soldiers, and those who live outside of the war, like the general population, friends, and family who live in another country outside the Vietnam War. Many of the soldiers’ families lived in the United States, so they basically had no idea about what was going on in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Because of this issue, many soldiers wrote letters and sent them to their families as a way to inform them about what was going on in the war; however, letters were just a way to inform, yet they could not truly understand the experiences that the soldiers went through from seeing the deaths of many people.