Mary Anne Bell was brought to Vietnam by her longtime boyfriend Mark Fossie, who was a medic. She is described the way the reader would think a “sweetheart” would be; innocent, beautiful, young and girly. Mary Anne is fresh out of high school, only seventeen, and had packed cosmetics and wore the style of the day. She joined Mark and the boys at a medical detachment, because Mark assumed that it was safe for her to stay with them there. Mary Anne connected with the nature of Vietnam; she accuses Mark and the soldiers of having a sheltered view of the land, because they were in the medical detachment. She had compassion for the Vietnamese people, even the one’s that were seen as the enemy. “It did not impress her that the VC owned the place. ‘Listen, it can’t be that bad...they’re human beings, aren’t they? Like everybody else?’”. Mary Anne never dehumanized the men they were fighting; she instead, saw them as equal to the American soldiers. The Sweetheart placed in the minds of the men was soon replaced. Mary Anne “wasn’t afraid to get her hands bloody...She didn’t back off from ugly cases...In times of action her face took on a sudden new composure, almost serene, the fuzzy blue eyes narrowing into a tight, intelligent focus.” They expected her to be scared, and to hate the gore and the blood of the war seen at by the medics, but Mary Anne seemed to embrace it. She soon abandoned the makeup, cut her hair short and ignored hygiene. She took up the ways of the men she was living with.
One night, she was gone. She had left with the Special Forces men on an ambush, fighting alongside the men, who seemed to respect her more than the medics. Although Mark got angry with her, she left again with Special Forces, this time for three weeks. When she returned, she sticked with the Green Berets, as they were called, and the medics came to the realization that she was no longer the bubbly “sweetheart” that first arrived. She had gone from an innocent to a warrior.
Mary Anne changed because she saw Vietnam differently than the men did. She never dehumanized the Vietnamese, and she saw the land as a place to explore. She realized that, enemy or not, these were still people, and she had compassion for them. She wanted to learn about their culture, rather than ignore it to make them easier to fight. Her change symbolized the change all of the men would face; she came, young and innocent, a “sweetheart”, and came back from the three weeks so different that she wore a necklace of human tongues, “[with] no emotion behind her stare, no sense of the person behind it.” Her drastic change represented that the boys that went off to war would not be the same boys that would return from it.
In regards to asking whether it matters that she is a woman, I believe that for the sake of the story, it does. She represented their innocence, and their loss of it. She represented the way they saw women, and how it changed. “You got these blinders on about women. How gentle and peaceful they are...You got to get rid of that sexist attitude,” is written after Mary Anne returns from her three-week ambush. It is realized, here, that no matter what gender they were, they were going to be affected by the the war and the land itself. Mary Anne went primitive, and her change was more drastic than the boy’s, but they all did transform based on their experience with the war. I think O’Brien made her transformation the most obvious on purpose, because of how women are stereotyped, but the symbolization of her change was meant to be applied to all of his characters.
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