Mary Anne in the Song Tra Bong

Mary Anne

Mary Anne had always been happy.  She was happy when she stood in the hall with her friends at school or when church ended and she could take off her high heeled shoes.  She was happy when she lost her first tooth, and every year on Easter, when her family would meet up with the Fossies to look for eggs in their front yard.  It was the content type of happiness, the kind that only a naive and proper upbringing in a nowheresville towns with a pretty little name could bring about. Now the stark, almost sickening contrasts of the two types of happinesses Mary Anne has known hung in her mind, as she stalked through the forests of Vietnam.  Flees ate at skin and ticks clung to her feet, fat with blood.  This, she thought, was true happiness, and it certainly beet the shitstop town she called home in Ohio.  It was there where she was expected, no, required to grow and form into the confines of the preconceived corset of conviction her mother and grandmother had surely lived, suffocated, and died in.  Her coarse hands and callious ways ripped like stitches from her skin and sown up with makeup and town meetings straight out of Iran Levin’s Stepford Wives novel.  With kisses from Mark and rides around the cul-de-sac in a shiny new Chevy Camaro.  No, in this place, she was able to breathe.

Mary Anne remembered her trip into Nam, The chopper smelling  of cigarettes, salted meat, and blood.  Men darkened by the sun and skirmishes with death squatted in a line close to the door, eyes glossy with indifference.  They’d done this a million times before.  She had not.  Her pink sweater was gripped so tightly between her fingertips and palm that her skin turned a sickly shade of white at the knuckles, their hold not breaking even as the ground rose to greet them and men rushed forward, taking boxes, loading crates, leaving bodies.  She jumped out of the compartment, not feeling it as the last string of her old life was ripped from her fuzzy pink sweater.

This was the third time her feet had met the ground in Vietnam, the air was heavy but clear, rain seeming eminent, yet none poured from the empty blue sky.  It had been simple to get there really; catch a plane from Bangkok to Saigon, Saigon to Chu Lai, Chu Lia to the United Service Organizations base, chopper into the aid center in Tra Bong; that was Mark’s plan.  But this was different, it felt different.  Mary Anne felt a layer of hot sand forming between her feet and heels.  She felt the burning sun against her skin.  She felt a foreign breeze.  But most of all, the whole thing felt strange.  Like electricity, but so very different, not at all like the shock of an outlet, but like lightning, and as Mark came forward, the tingling still hung in fingertips.

She had loved that  boy, no dought.  Her baby-blue doe-eyed boy; she’d known him since practically forever. Doting maybe, and arrogant for sure, but he was hers. She noted now how, even in war, his eyes still danced with a hopeful naivety that small town life had instilled in the both of them.  She’d once wanted to marry him, to become Mrs. Mark Fossie, but in that instance, with the strange foreign breeze and the light sky and the hot sand, she felt the corset of conformity slipping slightly from around her waist. It was then, after Mark had taken her hand and guided her forward with a mad grin, that Mary Anne was greeted with an onslaught of stories and faces, people she’d never met suddenly informing her of names, homes, activities, numbers, months.  This place, was different.

Mary Anne could remember the following weeks, as she explored the forest and lifestyle of a man in Vietnam.  She stitched up soldiers with dental floss and covered them with strips of her sweaters and skirts to stop bleeding.  She’d walked with the soldiers through villages where people with third degree burns and wounds leaking with maggots laid in the streets, used as firing practice by the soldiers, not to kill perse, but firing practice all the same.  Soon she’d learned to clean and assemble an M-16, as the boys thought she might’ve liked to do the same.  She’d broken her nails in the process.  

Her hair had become too intolerable to keep by the third week, nearly escaping having it sucked up when she ran up to choppers trying to get boxes before they flew back into the abyss, so she’d chopped that off too.  The Green Berets said it was a good move.  Mark did not agree, but then vanity was always his biggest enemy.

She remembered the first time she’d shot a gook and the second and the third.  She thought of the night outs with the Green Berets in which no one would ever know about, and the jaguar, and the songs.  The sense of pride and belonging when her colleagues, these men, counted her as their equal.  She remembered when she’d cut those tongue out,  still breathing  of course, so that she could get that peculiar shape that none of the Green Berets had.  She remembered when Mark had found her, and by then, how she couldn’t give a rats ass about Mark Fossie and his emotional state.  She remembered how, within those crystal hued baby blues, all of Mark’s dreams of ever having a Mrs. Mark Fossie had died and finally met her’s  of ever being Mrs. Fossie at the grave.  Mary Anne was gone.  

The girl who'd arrived a few weeks before, with halo tresses and kaki culottes was dead.  She laid with the toungueless Gooks and the doped up deadbeats at the foot of the mountains with no names.  No, this was someone new with her old memories, one without attachment or strife.  No corset of convictions hung around her slim frame.  Mary Anne breathed deeply, watching from her perch as another Vietnamese village was blown to ash.  This was true happiness.