Things They Carried

            The Things They Carried & A Soldier's Sweetheart.
             Difference Between Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong & A Soldier's Sweetheart.
             Once a successful novel hits the market, producers are inclined to adapt the story into a movie. Since imagination, symbolism, and character psyches are explored in a novel, the movies tend to lack the luster of the original text. Using their imagination, readers are able to conjure up characters and scenes that are unique. This is the case with Tim O"Brien's, "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." This is a story where love and war collide after a soldier brings his sweetheart to his Vietnamese post. On the whole, this chapter in The Things They Carried is far superior to the film, The Soldier's Sweetheart, because it has thorough descriptions of characters" feelings, including symbolism concerning objects and important events. When the audience is able to draw it's own story around an author's narrative, the experience is more satisfying than when every detail is presented through the cinematic medium - an active audience is happier than a passive one. .
             Stark contrasts exist between the description of the characters and emotional content between the book and the movie. This may be mainly due to the limited length of the movie. In the movie, Rat Kiley who is telling the story seems gentler. In the book they make it seem like everything Rat says is exaggerated, but the movie does not stress that fact. "Among the men in Alpha Company, Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts, and for most of us it was normal procedure to discount sixty or seventy percent of anything he had to say" (O"Brien 89). Also, the movie emphasizes the fact that Rat Kiley fell in love with Mary Anne Bell. He himself says he loved her towards the end of the movie. A character that people may tend to have sympathy for is Mark Fossie. In the book, one may not feel for Fossie.