The Sweetheart Of The Song Tra Bong Character Analysis

The Unfortunate Intertwining of Innocence and Death

Death and innocence are two major concepts that are connected in the The Things They Carried. When the soldiers and O’Brien first arrived in Vietnam, they had not yet began killing a single person, and unfortunately their livelihood was stolen from them when they were unlawfully drafted, and forced to carry the burden of death. They carried the weight of the world on their shoulders. Before the war, the soldiers did not have any experience; they didn't know how to kill, how to remove a bullet or how to cope with their friends dying in cold blood. Before the war, they were pure. The war consumed them, swallowed them up, and spit them out. The Vietnam War turned these men into

cold and empty vessels that have seen far too much. O'Brien is set on pointing out that despite their actions being carried by command, the men still became killers, making their crimes mitigated, this plays into the fact that the Vietnam War both preserves and/or creates the loss of innocence.
Perhaps the clearest loss of innocence is in the chapter "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” This is where the character Mary Anne is introduced.

Mary Anne was the girlfriend of a soldier, who had been shipped from America to Vietnam. She started out as an innocent blonde, wearing culottes and a pink sweater, but due to her curiosity and lack of fear for the war, she became fascinated with killing. After, becoming intoxicated with Vietnam, Mary Anne fell into a group of Green Berets, and vanished into the countryside. “She had crossed to the other side. She is now part of the land. She wore her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill." (116.Sweetheart of the Tra Bong). She is a symbol of what Vietnam can do to a person. Mary Anne came in with a sense of naivety and, a representation of complete ignorance towards the entire concept of war. The tale is about loss of innocence. Mary Anne is just a young girl from the suburbs, she personifies innocence to the soldiers. Throughout the chapter, her progression from a sweet girlfriend to something more malevolent than the Green Berets is an analogy for the loss of innocence through which all soldiers of Vietnam go through. “I mean, when we first got here—all of us—we were real young and innocent, full of romantic bullshit, but we all learned pretty damn quick. And so did Mary Anne.” (97. Song of the Tra Bong).The soldiers all pass into the war, into the

violence, murder, and darkness and just like Mary Anne, the innocent person they were disappears and would never be seen again.
Every death in the Things They Carried deals with a different topic; loss, guilt, remembrance, truth, and pain. These topics are all woven together into the land of Vietnam; whispering its deepest darkest secrets and burying them with the soldier’s guilt and pain. However, The soldiers weren’t completely innocent when they came but, still changed. An example of this change would be the character Rat, who was best friends with Curt Lemon. Rat’s friendship was built on love and purity, which is an obvious rebellion against the act of war. When Curt gets killed by grenades, Rat deals with the death by killing a baby buffalo in “How to Tell a True War Story”. The baby water buffalo was innocent, nevertheless, because of the death of Curt Lemon, Rat felt the need to relieve his pain. Rat’s compassion for his friend is replaced with vengeance and a yearn for the death. He replaces the light with darkness; the death of an innocent for the death of a friend. Rat’s violence came suddenly and pounded into the chapter to give a sense of what it is like losing your best friend.. “He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt.” (79. How to Tell a True War Story). He shot the buffalo multiple times as if killing a part of himself with each shot. He shot until there was nothing left except a mutilated corpse that’s still alive but gone at the same time. Rats innocence dies with Curt and when the buffalo is pushed into the water supply destroying the villages water more innocent lives are being shattered. Innocence and death are connected with the key topic of loss. You can not have the death of innocence without loss. There always has to be a motive. Something that drives the person over the edge.
The loss of innocence connects to death in various ways.

O'Brien and the rest of the soldiers thought death to be distant from reality, but the shock of living with a sudden death changed them from innocent boys cold to cynical men. The Vietnam War was a brute wake up call to create an overwhelming experience with death. The young men are thrown into a situation for which they were severely unprepared for. The draft does not give the men a choice on whether or not they are involved in war, so in turn, the characters are forced to cope by whatever means necessary in their fight to keep their own

sanity.
We witness O'Brien’s innocence being stripped when he lost Linda. We witness the baby water buffalo die as an representation of the death of an innocence. We witness Mary Anne innocence die and become part of the land. In this story, we the strength and purity and honor but also its downfall. All of the topics exemplify the idea that although the literal concept of death is depicted throughout this novel, it is the murder of each characters’ innocence that becomes the driving force towards their twisted path of unfortunate, yet inevitable destruction of their own individual mindsets.