Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong by Tim O’Brien is about a story told by an officer in the Vietnam War. The person who tells the story is named Rat Kiley. Rat Kiley was a story teller and all of the stories he told he swore were true; but they seemed a little farfetched. The sweetheart of Song Tra Bong refers to a young woman by the name of Mary Anne. Mary Anne was the girlfriend of Mark Fossie who was stationed at a base on the outskirts of Tra Bong when Rat was stationed there. With some careful planning and a lot of money, Fossie had managed to fly his girlfriend out to the base where he and Rat were stationed. Everyone loved Mary Anne, she was nice, good looking and everyone enjoyed being around her. After a while she stopped wearing dresses or worrying about her hygiene and started to become like one of the guys. Fossie was not concerned with this at first but then she started not coming home at night. Fossie was concerned she was sleeping with another person at the camp. It turns out she was; she was sleeping with all the Greenies, but not in a sexual way. She had become this Greenie that could not get enough of the jungle and the war; she was entranced by it all. One day she went out and did not come back for days. When she finally did, she came back and went straight to the Greenie’s hootch. Finally after days of her not coming out Fossie and Rat went into the Greenie’s hootch in search of her. What they found was a completely different girl, standing in front of them with a necklace made of tongues, and telling them with no emotion that they did not belong inside that hootch. After that Rat did not know what happened to her because he as shipped off to a new base. All he had heard was that one-day she went out into the jungle and never came back.

Tim O’Brien’s Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong is an entertaining yet farfetched story. The story told about Mary Anne by Rat Kiley immediately draws you in with suspense and figurative language, but when it is all said and done, the story is hardly non-fiction. The whole story starts off with an absurd story about how an officer at a base named Mark Fossie flew in his girlfriend Mary Anne from Cleveland. Rat in his story says, “At Evening chow Mark Fossie explained how he’d set it up. It was expensive, he admitted, and the logistics were complicated, but it wasn’t like going to the moon. Cleveland to Los Angeles, LA to Bangkok, Bangkok to Saigon. She’d hopped at C-130 up to Chu Lai and stayed overnight at the USO and in the morning hooked a ride west with the resupply chopper.” (O’Brien). Rat had said that the base was pretty lenient in terms of rules and regulations but a soldier would not be able to fly his girlfriend out to visit him nonetheless. It would be nearly impossible to arrange such a trip and the military would not let some girl ride in their aircrafts around Vietnam during a hostile war. The story becomes even more farfetched when Rat starts elaborating on how Mary Anne had turned into this hardcore Green Beret: “She wore a bush hat and filthy green fatigues; she carried a standard M-16 automatic assault rifle, her face was black with charcoal.” (O’Brien). Even if somehow a soldier were to have flown their girlfriend half was across the world to his base, she would not be allowed to handle weapons or go out with Green Berets. Green Berets are one of the toughest and highly trained groups of individuals in our army and they would not go on missions with another soldier’s girlfriend. O’Brien’s story is one of fiction but it is an example of how soldiers kept themselves occupied with each other by telling stories like this one.

Picture taken from: http://sites.google.com/site/wordandworld/thingstheycarriedcover2.jpg