payment page
“You’re in a place,” Mary Anne said softly, “where you don’t belong.” She moved her hand in a gesture that encompassed not just the hootch but everything around it, the entire war, the mountains, the mean little villages, the trails and trees and rivers and deep misted-over valleys.
When Mary Anne Bell first arrives in Vietnam, she is almost comically different from her peers. Not only is she a woman, but she’s outwardly feminine to a stereotypical degree, dressing in pink and wearing stylish pants. However, Mary Anne quickly adapts to Vietnam, growing not only to love it but also to become a part of it, to the degree that everyone else around her, including her former boyfriend, now seem like the outsiders. For many American soldiers, their stint in Vietnam is one that they hope to one day leave behind and move on from. For Mary Anne, Vietnam fundamentally and permanently changes – or reveals – who she truly is as a person.
When I’m out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it’s like I’m full of electricity and I’m glowing in the dark – I’m on fire almost – I’m burning away into nothing – but it doesn’t matter because I know exactly who I am. You can’t feel like that anywhere else.
Mary Anne Bell’s character voices a truth that Tim O’Brien and many of his peers must contend with – that there is something beautiful and exciting and enlivening about war. Tim and his fellow soldiers all learn that, despite the fear of death, war makes you feel alive in a vivid and exquisite way. Mary Anne experiences a more intense version of this feeling. In the chaos and brutality and excitement of Vietnam, the social assumptions of politeness, traditional marriage, societal expectation, and gender roles are stripped away, allowing Mary Anne to get to know a more animalistic version of herself. While many men can’t wait to return from Vietnam and to their former lives, Mary Anne feels so liberated by Vietnam that she never returns to America.
There it is, you got to taste it, and that’s the thing with Mary Anne. She was there. She was up to her eyeballs in it. After the war, man, I promise you, you won’t find nobody like her.
Many of the men in The Things They Carried are frustrated by the fact that their girlfriends and future wives will not be able to relate to their experiences in Vietnam, and that many of them actively don’t want to engage with any discussions or memories of the war. Mary Anne Bell represents the men’s yearning for a woman who shares their knowledge and trauma. It will be difficult for them to emotionally connect to a woman post-war in the way they’ve connected with their fellow soldiers in the war, so the fantasy of Mary Anne hinges on the fact that she is both a woman and a soldier.
