The story of the “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” is no typical Vietnam war story. It is a story that involves no bloods, guts or glory. This story isn’t so much about the physical damage caused by war as much as this story is about the emotional changes that effect not only the males. This is a story that with it’s elaboration and ornamentation shows the destruction of innocence. This story is about an impossible that came true.
The story in its simplest form involves two main characters and the storyteller, Rat Kiley, a well-known truth stretcher. The main people that your interest in this story is concerned with are Mark Fossie, a solider with the team of medics that Rat was with, and his girlfriend Mary Anne Belle, a young woman of barely 17 years of age.
Mark Fossie and Mary Anne Belle were childhood sweethearts nearly betrothed at birth. While in Nam, Mark came up with a master plan to fly Mary Anne over to Vietnam to be with him. As men joked one evening about how easy it could be to sneak someone over Mark heard and took this as no joke. He was going to try it! He spent almost all of his money to get her over but it paid off,they were reunited. The picture of a happy couple they spent most of their time together adn for a while things seemed very normal to them. All they had ever known was being a “them” and when they were together things just seemed to be right. How blindly we see things when we are surrounded by the arms of the one we love. She was young and curious and being the only women there she was very flirtatious.
Mary Anne was a bright girl and she wanted to learn all that she could about the war and the land. Her new found purpose becae to find as much as she could about the culture while she was in it. She often went for nature walks and began to learn the Vietnamese language/culture . Even her personality began to change. But eventually she began to learn about guns and war. She started to spend her free time cleaning and shooting. This began the downward trail to her becoming a camo wearing jungle woman.
Parallels Between The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway and The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
Parallels Between The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway and The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
During the decade of the 1920’s, America was going through many changes, evolving from the Victorian Period to the Jazz Age. Changing with the times, the young adults of the 1920’s were considered the “Lost Generation”. The Great War was over in 1918. Men who returned from the war had the scars of war imprinted in their minds. The eighteenth amendment was ratified in 1919 which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of liquor in the United States. Despite the eighteenth amendment, most people think of large, lavish parties when thinking about the 1920’s. The nineteenth amendment was passed in 1920 which gave women the right to vote, a major accomplishment in the women’s right movement. Women traded in their long, pinned-up hair styles for short, stylish bob haircuts. Two great American literary writers emerged from the “Lost Generation”: namely Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both men wrote their best novels during the 1920’s in which they examined the evils of the time, and the consequences that accompanied the actions of the characters who acted on such vices. There are parallels between the vices of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and the vices of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: namely excessive alcohol consumption, sexual promiscuity, and the power of money.
The first parallel between a vice in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and a vice in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is that of excessive alcohol consumption. The character’s in The Sun Also Rises; namely Brett Ashley, Jake Barnes, Robert Cohn, Mike Campbell and Pedro Romero, are residing in Europe were there is no prohibition on liquor. Whet…
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…oney and all the people he know through business contacts and the many parties he had thrown, only Nick and Gatsby’s father attended his funeral.
In conclusion, there are several parallels of vices between Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: namely the excessive consumption of alcohol, sexual promiscuity, and the power of money.
WORKS CITED
Fitzgerald, Scott F. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribers, 1925.
Jones. Interview. Celebration. BBS message 1160. 10/11/94.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Macmillan, 1954.
McDowell, Nicholas. Hemingway. Vero Beach: Rourke, 1989.
Monique, Interview. Theme. BBS message 1755. 11/03/94.
Rood, Karen Lane, ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale, 1980.
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