"Travelin Soldier," written by the female country trio, the Dixie Chicks, is a song about a stereotypical American war romance. The story starts with a young man dressed in his green army uniform ready to board the bus, but he decides to sit down at a café. His waitress is a pretty girl, who catches his eye with the bow in her hair. From that moment on, the two wrote to each other with as much love possible from opposite sides of the world and a war between them. Their love wasn't right in everyone else's eyes, but no one understood what they did for each other. When it got too bad in Vietnam for the soldier he thought of the girl's pretty smile and it kept him fighting to know that she was still there and smiling. At the end of the song, the soldier dies and the girl will never have the love of the traveling soldier again. But the idea the song displays, as well as the book, "The Things They Carried" is that in war, soldiers need to be reminded of innocence. Young girls fit the image of innocence perfectly. When Rat Kiley said he loved Mary Ann, that all of the soldiers loved her, he was referring to the reminder of the girls back home who didn't know a thing about the war and never would. The girls were pure and soldiers needed the reminder that purity still existed in a time of war. Girls played an underlying role that subtly kept the soldiers going.
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