'Sweetheart Of The Song Tra Bong'

In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, Tim uses a series of war stories to explain what it was like for him and his fellow soldiers in the Vietnam War. While many seem factually untrue, he describes a True war story as one that makes you feel the same emotions and feelings the soldiers had, opposed to true war stories that tell of what actually happened. He explains how the teller “wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt… facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around…” (O’Brien 89). The stories were made up based off how they felt experiencing it. One specific story, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” recounts the story of a soldier bringing over his girlfriend and the transformation she goes through as she spends time in the jungle. Through this story, O’Brien describes a True war story and is able to prove the point of telling them. As a soldier named Rat Kiley tells the story, the other men comment on it. When Rat asks them what they think will happen, the men point to the details Rat described and say, “...all that had to be there for a reason. That’s how stories work, man” (O’Brien 102). This shows that

“She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues” (O’Brien 116). The mental image of an innocent girl just out of high school wearing a necklace of human tongue shows how the war really affects people. It’s not just people getting dirty and firing guns. The soldiers are young boys and they are deliberately planning to take people’s lives. By comparing the soldiers to a cute girl, it is shown that these changes can happen to anyone. The story of Mary Anne proves itself to be a True war story because it accurately tracks the changes the people in the jungle face. By replacing the soldiers with a young girl, it better evokes a sense drastic change caused by the