TTTC

The Things They Carried: Mary Anne Bell

Symbolism

Mary Anne exists in the story as a symbol more so than as a character. The women in The Things They Carried in general represent the soldiers and their innocence before the war. Most of the women maintain this innocence, because do not get involved in the war at all, let alone actually go to Vietnam. Mary Anne did, and it changed her. At first, it's hard to tell if the change is positive or negative, but ultimately it becomes obvious that it's a change for the worse. She essentially becomes reduced to primal instincts. When Mary Anne (i.e., the soldiers' respective innocence, the soldiers themselves) goes to war, there is a fall from grace, so to speak, and she (i.e., the soldiers) is changed in an irreparable way.

With the Green Berets

Mary Anne Bell

Mary Anne didn't return until three weeks later, in the dead of night, and left as quickly as she came. The next morning, when Mark Fossie heard, "he stationed himself outside the fenced-off Special Forces area. All morning he waited for her, and all afternoon." At night, Mark, Rat Kiley, and another soldier named Eddie Diamond heard music from inside, and "in the background, just audible, a woman's voice was half singing, half chanting, but the lyrics seemed to be in a foreign tongue." It was Mary Anne. Mark went in to get her, and she was wearing the same clothes as when she first arrived—"her pink sweater and a white blouse and a simple cotton skirt [...] But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl's throat was a necklace of human tongues. Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a length of copper wire, one overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrill syllable. She describes feeling whole, and wanting to consume the country." Rat Kiley leads Mark outside, and Rat Kiley tells the Alpha Company that he doesn't know for sure what happened to Mary Anne, but he heard that Mary Anne walked off into the mountains and did not come back. No body was ever found. No equipment, no clothing. For all he knew, Rat said, the girl was still alive. Maybe up in one of the high mountain villes, maybe with the Montagnard tribes. But that was guesswork. [...] Mary Anne Bell joined the missing. But the story did not end there. If you believed the Greenies, Rat said, Mary Anne was still somewhere out there in the dark. Odd movements, odd shapes. Late at night, when the Greenies were out on ambush, the whole rain forest seemed to stare in at them—a watched feeling—and a couple of times they almost saw her sliding through the shadows. Not quite, but almost. She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill."

Mary Anne Bell starts the story as a seventeen-year-old "cute blonde—just a kid, just barely out of high school", arriving in Vietnam "with a suitcase and one of those plastic cosmetic bags" and wearing "white culottes and this sexy pink sweater". She was sent to Vietnam by her boyfriend, Mark Fossie. She had "a bubbly personality, a happy smile". Over time, however, she began to change. "She quickly fell into the habits of the bush. No cosmetics, no fingernail filing. She stopped wearing jewelry, cut her hair short and wrapped it in a dark green bandanna." One night, she goes out on an ambush with the Green Berets, and the following morning Mark yelled at her and "laid down the law". Their relationship turned sour, and "there was a strained, tightly wound quality to the way they treated each other, a rigid correctness that was enforced by repetitive acts of willpower." It eventually ended one morning when she left with the six Green Berets, without telling Mark.