Mary Anne Bell Character Analysis in The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried Mary Anne Bell Character Analysis

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Although Mary Anne only appears in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” she is one of the most memorable and unnerving characters in the book. As the only major female character, Mary Anne represents the sort of wholesome American girl many of the soldiers long for when she arrives in Vietnam to visit her boyfriend, Mark. However, Mary Anne turns out to be a crack sharpshooter. She is drawn to and eventually joins the Green Berets, the elite team of soldiers staying nearby. She is last seen wearing a necklace made of tongues and disappearing into the jungle. The implication is that the darkness and evil of the Vietnam War corrupted Mary Anne, and that the same darkness is inside every human soul, waiting to be brought out.

However, another reading of Mary Anne may look at her transformation as one of liberation. In Vietnam, Mary Anne is released from the confines of societal expectations and is instead free to explore her true self. Her intelligence, which was once limited to homemaking, and her athleticism, which was once limited to volleyball, are now redirected to more energizing pursuits, such as going out on ambush with the Green Berets. She quickly starts to discover that there is a life for her outside the confines of marrying young and having a family in her hometown. Mary Anne’s transformation is exaggerated to the realm of the mythic, but her journey from an innocent, naive girl to a completely self-sufficient woman who has surpassed all of her male peers in capability.

Mary Anne’s character also addresses the gendered issues that appear throughout the collection. Prior to “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” the men’s relationship to women is one of distance and frustration. The women in their lives can’t truly empathize with their experiences as soldiers, and often the women have moved on romantically with other men by the time the war is over. The men feel abandoned, but even more importantly, that they’ll never have a relationship with a woman who can understand what it’s like to be at war. Mary Anne is particularly attractive to them because she intimately knows the electrifying, life-changing experience of war.

Additionally, Mary Anne’s transformation shows that the divide between the men in Vietnam and their female peers back home is not caused by gender but simply by the stark difference in civilian and non-civilian perspectives. Rat Kiley insists that women are considered sweet, naive, and uninterested in violence not because this is their natural instinct but rather because they have not been given the opportunity to experience their basest animal urges. He believes that men and women are ultimately the same, and that Vietnam will bring out the same brutality and wildness in everyone, regardless of gender. Mary Anne is evidence of this theory.

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