Violence In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Behind the Scenes Violence

In 1954, a war broke out in Vietnam due to the North Vietnamese’s desire to unify the entire country under a single communist regime (Brittanica) after they overthrew the French rule in Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, America intervened, causing many soldiers to be sent into Vietnam through the draft system. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien tells a story of some of the many experiences of the soldiers during the Vietnam War. However, even though the novel is based on the Vietnam War, the novel trivializes the distress of the Vietnamese people during the time of war. To a degree, Tim O’Brien’s exclusion of details of the Vietnamese people’s suffering disregards the extensive suffering they endured.

First off,

Mary Anne came on to the base as an aid to the Americans, but later on she leaves to become “part of the land”. In her time aiding the American base she ponders about the Vietnamese people and their culture. All the other characters, especially the American soldiers, disregarded the Vietnamese, and Mary Anne’s profound interest in them. Mary Anne’s curiosity for the Vietnamese people was often overlooked by the American soldiers because of the possible dangers of engaging with the Viet Cong. Her interest and compassion for the Vietnamese opens Mary Anne to ask, “‘Listen, they can’t be that bad’ […] ‘they’re human beings, aren’t they? Like everyone else?’” (O’Brien 92). Mary Anne’s question proves that she is the only character throughout the novel that understands the extensive suffering of the Vietnamese people during the war, and how their anguish was overlooked by the Americans. Mary Anne believes it was unfair towards the Vietnamese how they were treated by the Americans based on the assumption they were all Viet Cong. However, Mary Anne ignores the wishes of the American soldiers and continues to explore the Vietnamese lands and learn their customs. When Mary Anne returns to the camp after exploring the Vietnamese lands, O’Brien portrays Mary Anne to be a savage, “no sense of the person behind it. 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 tongue overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrill syllable” (O’Brien 105). Mary Anne’s necklace of tongues appeared on her neck after coming back from traversing Vietnam, making it apparent that she found the