Fifty-eight thousand, one hundred forty-eight soldiers were killed in Vietnam. Over seventy-five thousand were disabled, and over five thousand lost limbs. Of those killed in Vietnam, eleven thousand four-hundred sixty-five were younger than twenty years of age. Five men killed in the war were only sixteen. Innocence was perhaps these young men’s greatest trait. Innocence is a theme that readers see throughout “The Things They Carried”, a book written by Tim O’Brien, a former Vietnam soldier. This theme is seen most prominently in “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” and “Lives of the Dead”.
Most soldiers who showed up in Vietnam were young men from the average ages of nineteen to twenty-six. The story of “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”
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A “…seventeen year old, fresh out of Cleveland Heights Senior High” girl called Mary Anne is the focal point of Rat’s story. Mary Anne was shipped from America to Vietnam by her “…grammar school sweetheart…”, and arrived an innocent and naïve young woman. Similar to Mary Anne is the character Linda, in the story “Lives of the Dead”. She is introduced as a young girl of only nine with “poise and great dignity”, and is Timmy’s fourth-grade sweetheart. Both Linda and Mary Anne are introduced as sweet-faced and gentle. Their fates, however, are extraordinarily different. Unfortunately, Linda dies at a very young age, due to a brain tumor. As a result of this early death, Linda remained innocent in the mind and eyes of Tim O’Brien. Little is known about what happened to Mary Anne, when or how she died. However, the friendly and bubbly teen was a curious individual, and as she became progressively more immerged in the land and culture of Vietnam, Mary Anne began to change. The change was not immediate. Slowly, Mary Anne began stop wearing cosmetics and she “stopped wearing jewelry, cut her hair short and wrapped it in a dark green bandana”. She started spending time with