Summary V. Analysis Blog Post

Frankie Pena

Eng 102

10/3/10

Summary V. Analysis Blog Post

“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” the characters ‘Rat, kiley” “Mitchell, Sanders” “Eddie, Diamond” “Mark Fossie” “Marry, Anne, Bell”. These characters were caught up in a compound that was situated at the top of a flat hillside in the outskirts of Tra Bong. These soldiers are fighting a never ending war. But throughout this war they have time to sit around and reminisce about girls and good times. While sitting around “Eddie said, was pool some bucks and bring in a few mamma-sans from Saigon, spice things up, and after a moment one of the men laughed and said, “Our own little EM club,” and somebody else said “Hey yeah we pay are fuckin dues, don’t we?”(pg 93,O’Brien).

Now these guys where just messing around to kill time and well they were playing around “Mark Fossie” went off to write a letter and six weeks later his bubbly eyed girlfriend shows up in a helicopter. With eyes of surprise everyone stand around and out of nowhere someone says what everyone else was thinking “mother fucker”. After a few weeks in the compound this girl was helping in surgery and taking apart guns. Before Mark knew it she was going out with the greenies in the jungle doing searches at night. Well it wasn’t to much longer before she got to into it, mark could not see the old “Marry Anne Bell” that is her name. This girl was out of his hands and just before he had a chance to really talk to Mary, she went out one night and never came back. The gist of the story is she came in innocent but once she got a little dirty she was never the same.

When reading I didn’t understand why Mark would bring his loved one to such a dirty place. The compound is not really the place for a cute innocent loved one anyways. When he went to the compound he was a tall blond athlete and all that had changed he now carried anger and wasn’t so nice. Well once he brought this girl over and saw she was starting to change he should have sent her back home whether or not if she liked it. Because it wasn’t her place to be at unless assigned. Then once she started going out at night with the greenies he should have known it was only going to get worse. Once she disappeared I knew it was over and he lost his loved one. Sometimes people just cant handle what they see and they just lose it like Mary did. Lets this be an example to us all.
here is a link to some good stuff: http://www.illyria.com/tob/tobbio.html