Song Tra Bong and the American Dream

"When we first got here--all of us--we were real young and innocent, full of romantic bullshit, but we learned pretty damn quick” (97). This quote was extracted from the book The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, and exemplifies the power that the war had in exploiting one's innocence. The Vietnam War drastically altered the soldiers’
American Dreams due to the great abundance of evil which was celebrated throughout the war. One thing that could be agreed on is that lives of the soldiers introduced would never possess the same vivacity and optimism found prior to serving.

Mark Fossie’s girlfriend symbolizes everything good about the United State of America. With her pink sweater and culottes, she is the All-American girl with an American Dream. “Mary Anne and Fossie had been sweethearts since grammar school and since sixth grade on they had known for a fact that someday they would get married, live in a house near Lake Erie, and have three children, That was the plan” (95). The chapter “Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong” examines the transformation that occurs when this innocent girl is lifted out of the Cleveland suburbs and plunked down in the mountains of Vietnam. The events of the war and the eerie silence of the mountain jungles have a hypnotic effect on the young teenager. As she learns how to clamp off arteries and assemble an automatic rifle, she starts to lose the innocence that Mark loves so much about her. Not only did her transformation occur internally, it manifested in her external appearance."No cosmetics, no fingernail filling. She stopped wearing jewelry, cut her hair short and wrapped it in a green bandana. Hygiene became a matter of small consequence"(98). Here she is taking on masculine features and her feminine ways are forgotten. Eventually, she sheds her youthful dreams of getting married immediately after Mark’s return. Finally she separates from him completely.
The jungle has an even more radical effect on her character. After going out on ambush with the Green Berets, she develops a more violent and deadly disposition. She wears a necklace of human tongues and hangs out in the surreal world of the greenie hootch. She develops an appetite for the country of Vietnam, telling Mark, “Sometimes I want to eat this place. Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country the dirt, the death I just want to eat it and have it there inside me. That's how I feel. It's like . . . this appetite” (111). In the end, she disappears into the jungle and holds her own individual ambush night after night. The entire story is a metaphor for how the war takes American youth and purity and corrupts it, leaving a series of teenage killing machines.

Before coming to Song Tra Bong, Mary Anne could never have understood Mark’s experiences in the war. According to Rat Kiley, “Mary Anne made you think about all those girls back home, how clean and innocent they are, how they’ll never understand any of this, not in a billion years...They won’t understand zip. It’s like trying to tell someone what chocolate tastes like” (113). Rat Kiley is talking about the sense of isolation soldiers feel from their peers back in the United States. They have little in common with former friends when they return. In “The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong”, Tim O’Brien describes a highly stylized version of Vietnam as a world that profoundly affects the foreign Americans who inhabit it. Vietnam’s influence prompts Mary Anne to make plans for future travel and to attempt to steer her path away from the life she earlier considered desirable. Her and Mark Fossie “...were very much in love, full of dreams, and in the ordinary flow of their lives the whole scenario might well have come true” (95). Without the Vietnam War interfering in their lives, Mark and Mary Anne could’ve lived their American Dream. Many men who actually experienced the war first hand had a loss of hope. Their American Dream was something that they could never attain, Vietnam transformed American youth permanently.