The title story of O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is heavily anthologised and studied and pored over but, for me, this is the collection’s standout tale. A young medic in Vietnam, Mark Fossie, smuggles his all-American sweetheart Mary Anne into his jungle camp. All is oddly frolicsome and gambolling, there is a wedding proposal, Mary Anne learns to cook and dress wounds and then things go tar-black dark. Haunting and unforgettable. ‘Build Your Own Gook’. My skin still crawls.
Published in The Things They Carried, Flamingo, 1991
A Personal Anthology 