O'Brien exerts his power over the story that dominates his life. He has the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as time changes. (Salman Rushdie) He tells his audience, in The Things They Carried, a compilation of stories in order to help others understand his whole story about Vietnam. All that O'Brien believes and feels about what happened while he was in Vietnam is what he is attempting to illustrate. Then the statistics and facts directly concerning the war are unimportant. O'Brien's foremost purpose is to help others understand his story. He is not concerned with the story's believability but rather the story's capability of expressing many events over a period of time that has shaped who O'Brien is today. In this paper I would like to focus on Rat Kiley's story about Mary Anne which is told second hand by O'Brien. Although, this story is not one that O'Brien may have directly experienced it is a story of which he feels is a part of his overall experience in Vietnam. Therefore it is necessary for him to shape it and retell it so his readers may look beyond the actuality of the story and to the deeper meaning of it.
Mary Anne first emerges in The Things They Carried within a story called "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Brong-. She is introduced to the men of the platoon as an idealized American sweetheart. She has the stereotypical appearance of an American girl worth the admiration and respect of all men: "She had long white legs and blue eyes and a complexion like strawberry ice cream."" (O'Brien 93) The comparison between Mary Anne's skin tone and strawberry ice cream is very interesting. It could be interpreted as a metaphor for Mary Anne's sweet and delicate demeanor appealing to children (wholesome) when first arriving to Vietnam. Mary Anne proves to represent the changes in spirit and personalities of the American men who fight in Vietnam.