// War Literature

What I would like to explore with my final paper is “war as a theater of experience.” From the material we have read in class, it is obvious that anyone who experiences war (whether they’re a soldier, a civilian, a victim, etc.) is changed. The period I want to focus on is during the Vietnam War and what I want to discover is how war transforms the identity of those who participate. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” presents to us a fascinating story about how a typical, ordinary American girl named Mary Anne becomes “one” with the Vietnamese “jungle”. She is a small town girl who travels to Vietnam at the request of her boyfriend. Her role was originally to comfort her boyfriend but her “narrow” way of thinking gradually expands as she absorbs knowledge of the Vietnamese culture, first by picking up some of the language to eventually learning how to use weapons. It is ironic that the more she learned about the environment and culture of Vietnam, the further she withdrew from civilization.

I know what Mary Anne eventually becomes but what is interesting to discuss is how does she transform? In the story, we never see the enemy. There are no tour guides. Most of Mary Anne’s exposure to the Vietnamese culture is through raw experience. It is not a rapid but gradual change, consisting of cultural, gender, and psychological transformations. My ideas are still not perfectly organized yet but I know I will probably spend a lot of my time speaking about identity, culture, and gender and the roles they play in the Vietnam War in my paper.

My working bibliography currently includes

Booth, Alan, and Cynthia Gimbel. “Who Fought in Vietnam?” Social Forces 74.4 (1966): 1137-157. JSTOR. Web. 1 Dec. 2010.

National Geographic: Inside the Green Berets. Dir. Steven Hoggard. Nat’l Geographic Vid, 2007. DVD.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: a Work of Fiction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Print.