Tim O Brien's Sweetheart Of The Song Tra Bong

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Tim O’Brien, in his novel The Things They Carried, retells the many stories he acquired from his time in military service in Vietnam. In one of his chapters, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” O’Brien has his character Rat Kiley tell the story of a soldier who managed to smuggle his girlfriend into Vietnam. This girl, Mary Anne, arrives in culottes and a pink sweater, giving a portrayal of a feminine character. Throughout the story, she involves herself in progressively gruesome activities, such as performing emergency medical procedures and going on ambushes with the Green Berets; and by the end, she is wearing a necklace of human tongues. This demonstrates that Mary Anne is consumed by Vietnam, and ultimately disappears to become “one with the land.” O’Brien uses this story to convey that the soldiers in the Vietnam War were forever changed by the horrifying experiences that they experienced.
He gives specific reasoning, such as “a true war story is never moral” and “a true war story cannot be believed.” This ties into this chapter, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” when O’Brien states that Rat Kiley had a tendency to exaggerate his stories, so the credibility of his story is already tarnished. Despite Kiley’s pleas stating that his story is absolutely true, this doesn’t stop O’Brien and the other soldiers from subconsciously “subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute, and then multiplying by maybe.” This metaphor created by O’Brien tells that the platoon did not think of Kiley’s stories as completely fiction, but that they understood Rat’s tendency to “heat up the truth… you would feel exactly as he felt.” Kiley tells the story in a hyperbolic fashion because he has an emotional connection to the story, and it’s hard to believe because he makes the story sound too crazy to have

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