Contrary to the protagonist "O'Brien's" experiential insulation from Vietnamese culture, which is a kind of "uncivilized other" according to the terms of U.S. rhetoric that largely defined the war, Mary Anne Bell is a character who deliberately strove for cultural immersion. For "O'Brien," the landscape and the Vietnamese occupying that landscape, such as the elderly Vietnamese men who watch him revisit the spot where Kiowa perished, are mostly incidental. Mary Anne actively sought out the ways of the Vietnamese, not just to observe from a distance, but to participate in if possible. Mary Anne, who should have behaved according to accepted Western norms, becomes so much a part of the landscape of Vietnam that she becomes "unnatural" to Mark and Rat. For example, the humming they hear coming from the Greenies' hut is freaky and unnatural, somehow not human, but it is Mary Anne's humming. And particularly as a female, she should be "domesticated" and behave in accordance with the readers' expectations of a young woman in a decade prior to the women's liberation movement. Instead she is seduced by the foreign landscape of Vietnam — one which "O'Brien" resists and barely describes — and is reduced to her animal-like primal self, a killing machine. Finally, opposite to "O'Brien," Mary Anne shows no resistance to the landscape, and has the agility and prowess to slip into the jungle like an adept, predatory jungle animal ready for the hunt.
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