In”Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” Rat Kiley tells the story about a young man named Fossie who he was with earlier in the war, which had his girlfriend come and stay with him while he was in Vietnam. This girl eventually went out with the “greenies” (101). She eventually goes out with the greenies and stays in the same bunker as them. Whenever Fossie gains the courage to go in and find his future wife, he is hit by an awful smell of “joss sticks and incense, like the fumes of some exotic smokehouse,” but what was more disturbing was a smell that “paralyzed your lungs” (109). Whenever he finally found his Mary Anne, she was wearing a “necklace of human tongues” (110). Also
In John Kerry’s testimony to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he explains that the United States basically forced these people to do these horrific things while away in Vietnam. Also in this testimony, Kerry talks about how many people that lived in Vietnam did not even care which side they were fighting for. The way that these people determined which sides to take was determined on who go there first. This evidence proves that these soldiers were doing things for people who really could care less about the greater good that was trying to be achieved in Vietnam.
On the website, http://www.vietnamwar.com/mylai.htm, the massacre of those at My Lai are portrayed and it becomes apparent that those who were in this war would do things which are out of characteristic.
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The story you picked fit in exactly with what John Kerry was talking about, people doing things out of character; such as Mary Ann wearing the "necklace of tongues. This would most definitely be considered to be out of character. Also to be talking of things that were done out of character, having his girlfriend flown in to be with him at war, seemed sincerely out of character in my mind. That would never have been possible today, and it wasn't something that would even occur could have happened in the past.
There's no doubt that war changes people for the worse. Imagine how it would feel to be Fossie after the whole ordeal was over. I mean, he brought over someone he loved and she was forever changed and never seen again. I know if that had been me (though I can't say I would have done that in the first place) I would have been buried in the guilt. Some parents lost their young girl forever and some young girls lost their friend in the strangest most bizarre way possible. Fossie's selfishness in war led him to make a bad decision and he paid dearly for it.
I think that's really sad. Soldiers were over there, trying to help them maintain their freedom, and they didn't even really care. I think that's what war does though. It breaks everything down until there's really nothing left. There's just raw emotion. War is painful for everybody.
Cory, you do a great job of making connections between the cultural context as reflected in the primary source and the literature; also appreciated the excellent resource you included about My Lai. I hadn't read this report before...
Ashleigh, I was confused by your post, probably because the absence of referents for the pronouns -- who do you mean when you say: "help THEM maintain THEIR freedom, and THEY didn't even really care"? there's no noun for the "them/their/they" to refer to?
It should also be noted that, while the mainstream media don't seem to observe this grammatical reality, "freedom" isn't a noun but the object of a prepositional phrase: it refers to freedom FROM something or freedom TO DO something, so more specificity about what you mean there is also needed...
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