Sweetheart Of The Song Tra Bong Summary

In the story “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” by Tim O’Brien, the story is taking place during the beginning of the Vietnam war in the Quảng Ngãi Province of Tra Bong in Vietnam. We are introduced to Mark Fossie,a member of the medical corps that are stationed in Cui Lai or also known as Danang. War time is hard on everyone, and it can have a hard impact on the soldiers that are stationed in the various places. This story explains the fact that war can be a terrible and feared place to be by showing us an example of what happens with Mary Anne and Mark Fossie.

Mark Fossie;an American, is just a boy when he was deployed to Vietnam to serve in the medical corps. The medical corps never had very much action where they were stationed, but

Mark started seeing her without jewelry and she soon was helping the medical corps with the messy cases that they would get. She also shot a gun for the first time! Curiosity was getting the better of Mary Anne and she wanted to go into town one day to explore the life and culture.Going into town was very dangerous because the VC (Viet Cong) controlled the town. However, she kept asking Mark to go and finally he reluctantly agreed to let her go. He would do anything to make her happy. She walked right through the entire town without one single hint of fear. She gradually stopped visiting the barracks at night to sleep with Mark. Mark was confused, he thought that she had been sleeping with other men, and Rat wanted to help him find out for sure. “But I can’t….If she’s there, I mean, if she’s with somebody.”(217) It had become much worse than that. They found out that she had not been sleeping with other men, she had been “laying down” (218) in their terms. Another way of saying it is that she had gone on a late night ambush. She hadn't told anyone that she was going, she just went with the Green Berets(Greenies) and came back at sunrise the next morning looking completely exhausted. Mark Fossie wanted to talk to her but she did not want to and went inside the barracks. Eventually Mark was able to get Mary to talk and they talked for a while. When Mark came back outside where the others were talking he announced that he and Mary Anne were

Soon Mary Anne became gloomy and would not talk to anyone. She had fallen in love with the landscape. The next morning she and the six Greenies were gone. It crushed Mark Fossie when he heard of it, he would walk around and mutter "Lost.”(220) Mary Anne came back three weeks later, but she had changed. She was almost a completely different person than the one that Mark Fossie once knew and had fallen in love with. It wasn’t long until she disappeared again. Mark, Rat, and Eddie(another friend of Mark) went after her. The found her by following the music. They were not prepared for what they found. Before them they saw bones, dead animal skins and they say the worst thing was the smell of it all. Mary Anne was found wearing a necklace of human tongues, but still in the clothes she had arrived in. She was the same girl on the outside for the most part, but she had completely changed on the inside forever. Mark didn’t believe his eyes and he wanted to bring her back to be the way she was. Rat said to him, “Man, you must be deaf. She’s already gone.”(224) Rat had already realized that they could not change her back to who she was before she was brought over to Vietnam. They were afraid of what she had become and wanted to change her back