In her ‘white culottes and sexy pink sweater’, seventeen-year-old blonde Mary Anne is smuggled into Vietnam by her medic boyfriend Mark Fossie. They spend weeks sleeping and sunbathing together while the other GIs stationed there go green with envy. But Mary Anne is curious. She visits the local village and asks about weapons and the war. She learns to disassemble an M-16. She cuts her fingernails and her hair, wrapping it in a dark green bandana. She starts fraternising with the squad of six Green Berets also stationed there. Mark gets nervous and suggests it’s time for her to return to Cleveland, but she refuses and, after a showdown, Mary Anne disappears the next morning with the Green Berets. It’s three weeks before she returns and Mark knows by the dead look in her eyes that she is lost to the jungle. In the end, Mary Anne goes out on nighttime raids that even the Green Berets balk at. Eventually, she never comes back at all, but some swear they have seen her ‘sliding through the shadows … wearing a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill.’
In The Things They Carried, Broadway Books, 1990
A Personal Anthology 