The story about Mary Anne is an odd one. For a woman to come over to Vietnam not as a soldier but just as a girlfriend was an insane idea in that time. It was even crazier for her to run off with a group of soldiers and actually fight. Now if this is a true story, I'm not quite positive about, but I do know what O'Brien was trying to tell the reader through this story.
Mary Anne came over as an innocent girl, and she left as a hard-core soldier. The war changed people, and Mary Anne was a perfect example of that. Everyone that went into the war came out a different person, and the characterization that occurs to Mary Anne illustrates that change to the reader. O'Brien tells us that after the war, "she never returned. Not entirely, not all of her," (page 100). Through this story, true or not, O'Brien paints a picture of the true negative changes that the War brought on in people.
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