Not-So-Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

Without question, Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong is my favorite story that we have read in The Things They Carried. It is so good that I want to say that it is the best story in the entire book without having even read the rest. The brilliance of this story almost makes me believe that Tim O’Brien made it out of pure fiction and then slipped it into the book as simply a grabbing-at-straws attempt to get the reader to understand what war is really like.

The brilliance of Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong is best seen while only looking at a few pages in the exposition and the climax, and then putting the story together with the rest. I say this because of the stark contrast between the beginning and the end of this story.

In the beginning, Marry Anne lands in Vietnam in attire that makes me question the facts legitimacy of this story. She hops off of the helicopter wearing culottes and a pink sweater for goodness sake! (pink being socially deemed a “feminine” color obviously)

Fast forward to the end of the story and you’ve got the same girl that arrived in the pink sweater and culottes wearing a necklace MADE OF HUMAN TONGUES. Marry Anne is the perfect example and at the same time the absolute extreme of what war does to a person. She is so much the perfect example that her entire being emphasizes this change down to the clothes that she is wearing!

The soldiers in this story got the closest thing possible to actually watch oneself do something in real time, and see that something before it happens. The soldiers got to watch an inevitable part of their lives that no one would talk about but everyone was thinking, in the most plain and grandest sense possible, from beginning to end. This story isn’t about Mary Anne, it’s about each and every soldier that went to war or will ever go to war.



Funny coincidence, human tongues are also pink.