The Things They Carried

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his friend but did not. Bowker felt so guilty and so helpless because of Kiowa’s death that he eventually broke, and he hung himself. He looked out across the lake and imagined the feel of his tongue against the truth.” Norman feels as though he needs to tell the town what happened to him in the Vietnam War and how he was not able to save his best friend Kiowa. He feels guilt and it eats at him.

Mary Ann was a young girl coming to the war to be with her boyfriend and slowly changes throughout being in the war. “You got these blinders on about women. How gentle and peaceful they are. All that crap about how if we had a pussy for president there wouldn’t be more wars. Pure garbage. You got to get rid of that sexist attitude.”

Even though Mary Ann is a female, she is a prime example how women can conform to the war just like men and it changes them forever. “‘What happened to her’, Rat said, ‘was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it’s never the same. A question of degree. Some make it intact, some don’t make it at all. For Mary Anne Bell, it seemed, Vietnam had the effect of a powerful drug: that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure that comes as the needle slips in and you know you’re risking something.’” At first MaryAnn comes to the war as an innocent teen but once the war is over, she is changed forever. This represents the soldiers that fight in the war. They are just like Mary Ann, they aren’t the same after the war.