Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

                           I think Mary Ann becomes in essence one with Vietnam she kills to protect it, for I think she has learned to love it.  It does not matter that she is a women, but most men are afraid of it for they do not know Vietnam, she learns to know it. They are afraid for they know of the stories from fellow soldiers. She is new to the land however, and morphs to it she wants to incorporate herself into the earth she camouflages herself into it. I think O'Brien lets Rat Kiley tell part of the story because individually the soldiers know so little of what and who they are fighting because they do not know of the land—Vietnam. I believe Rat's story fits O'Brien's criteria for how to tell a true war story, because it definitely does not suggest models of proper human behavior, and has no moral, and neither does war itself. War falls to the land it disappears and wears away it becomes the land just as Mary Ann did.

                         Most of the men went to war, not because they enlisted, but because they were drafted. Instead of running away from it all, decided that they cared more about honoring their families by going to war and not "shaming them." Mary Ann however was not afraid she did not care about the what the soldiers thought, she learned to love the land and and learned to become one with it and to protect it.