Like many of O’Brien’s stories, this one is not really about what it seems to be about. This is not a story about Mary Anne and her transformation—it is a story about storytelling and the loss of innocence. The meta-textual discussion is about storytelling, the dynamic of truth and belief between Rat Kiley and Mitchell Sanders. The vignette begins with O’Brien talking about truth. Rat, the company believed, told a certain amount of truth in each of his stories, but always exaggerated them as well. They never disbelieved him, but never fully trusted his “facts.” So it was with this story, which Sanders insists just does not “ring true.”
Kiley, however, insists that he is a witness to most of the actual events. Slowly, as the story of Mary Anne’s transformation progresses, Sanders focuses his objections less on the truth of Kiley’s story and more on the telling itself. He and the other members of the troop pick out particular words like “dumb” and challenge Kiley on his exact characterization of Mary Anne. O’Brien comments on people’s expectations about stories and their purpose in telling them. In the chapter, Kiley stops and asks Sanders what he thinks happened next in the story, challenging Sanders to share his expectations of stories. This action raises issues about the veracity of the story that Rat tells.
O’Brien talks about how Kiley tells the story, with a broken flow and interjecting his own thoughts into the meaning. Sanders takes up this side of storytelling, saying “the whole tone, man, you’re wrecking it.” Sanders has moved from not believing to believing so much that he wants the story told better. When Kiley admits he does not know what happened to Mary Anne, Sanders gets up-in-arms and says that telling a story without an ending violates the rules of storytelling. To Sanders, endings complete stories and make them true. He has now completely dissolved any difference between story and truth (or fiction and fact).
The meta-textual discussion of storytelling must be applied to author O’Brien. He tells a story with no ending, and his characters seem to know that. Perhaps that is why they are so troubled and why Sanders desperately wants an ending to Mary Anne’s story. Sanders learns that however much truth there is to Kiley’s story, he is more interested in the emotional weight of the tale, seeking completion. O’Brien successfully obscures the line between story and truth, and readers must ponder how much of the story is “true,” how much is fictional, and whether that makes a difference in how we receive the novel.
The tale is about loss of innocence. Mary Anne is a convenient character because as a young person from the suburbs, a high school sweetheart, and a woman, she personifies innocence to the soldiers. Her progression from a sweet girlfriend to something more bestial than the Green Berets is an analogy for the loss of innocence through which all soldiers of Vietnam go. “O’Brien,” Azar, Kiowa, Sanders, and all the young men sent to Vietnam departed from America “green” and left their innocence like baggage on the fields of a foreign land. For Mary Anne, the presence of her sweetheart gave her moments of pause in her transformation, where she took occasional steps back into sweetness. For the men of Alpha Company, a letter, a picture, or a pair of stockings could have pulled them back to the world of cleanliness and refinement, the world of love. Eventually, though, they all passed into the war, into violence, dirt, murder, and darkness. Just like Mary Anne, the innocent persons they were would never be seen again.
Sanders wants an ending to the story because he and the rest of the soldiers subconsciously want to know how their own lives will turn out. How will they return to their families, or will they ever return? These questions are a major inquiry in war literature, like Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and one of the major questions of O’Brien’s novel. This same desire is what motivates “O’Brien” to write about his experiences in Vietnam and to author a writer’s memoir. This yearning for completion, such as “O’Brien’s” return trip to Vietnam in “Field Trip,” is a major impetus in war novels in general, as a method of combating the general sense of meaninglessness that marks modern wars.
