“No doubt exists that all women are crazy; it’s only a question of degree,” W. C. Fields once said. Well what’s the highest degree? Are women really crazy, or do they just change? In the chapter “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” in the book The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien lets us answer these questions ourselves. The chapter is a sweet one, we think in the beginning. It’s about a young soldier flying his sweetheart out to the war in Vietnam for a visit, since he can’t visit her. She is young, only 17, but quickly becomes submerged in the war by traveling to different cities, helping wounded soldiers, and even disappearing into battles. Her boyfriend, Mark Fossie, believes it’s time for Marry Anne to go home, but she believes otherwise.
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The endless nights, the ambushes, the disappearances. Next comes the biggest change of all. Mary Anne starts going to battles, experiences a new high. She begins killing and taking multiple war souvenirs. “Twice, though, she came in late at night. Very late. And then finally she did not come in at all” (99). But how is this just a change? How has she not gone crazy? She is collecting a necklace of tongues and chanting and dancing around a leopard head. What about the other hundred soldiers that take fingers as souvenirs? Because she has been exposed to a different place, she is a changed person. She is in a different country with different people that lead a different lifestyle while there is a war going on. She is learning about death and killing. Change is inevitable. We all experience it. Like when I travel to a different island for a day. I begin exploring. Suddenly, I venture so deep into the forest I can no longer see an outing. I am in stealth mode. My home is no longer real. I am a hunter, a survivor. Who knows how long it will be until I am rescued? But just as nights come to days, reality breaks fantasies. I travel home. Just as Mary Anne would have done, if she hadn’t of ventured far into the mountains. So far, she never returned. She changed so much, she was dehumanized and striped of her civilization so much, she lost her original way of
The endless nights, the ambushes, the disappearances. Next comes the biggest change of all. Mary Anne starts going to battles, experiences a new high. She begins killing and taking multiple war souvenirs. “Twice, though, she came in late at night. Very late. And then finally she did not come in at all” (99). But how is this just a change? How has she not gone crazy? She is collecting a necklace of tongues and chanting and dancing around a leopard head. What about the other hundred soldiers that take fingers as souvenirs? Because she has been exposed to a different place, she is a changed person. She is in a different country with different people that lead a different lifestyle while there is a war going on. She is learning about death and killing. Change is inevitable. We all experience it. Like when I travel to a different island for a day. I begin exploring. Suddenly, I venture so deep into the forest I can no longer see an outing. I am in stealth mode. My home is no longer real. I am a hunter, a survivor. Who knows how long it will be until I am rescued? But just as nights come to days, reality breaks fantasies. I travel home. Just as Mary Anne would have done, if she hadn’t of ventured far into the mountains. So far, she never returned. She changed so much, she was dehumanized and striped of her civilization so much, she lost her original way of