Tim O’Briens conflicts

In “The Things They Carried” there are many different main characters all told from their view points. But the one that sticks to me the most is the story of Mark Fossie and Mary Ann…starts of as Fossie gets Mary over to Vietnam and then they live in a short of honeymoon stage for a while. That is till the conflict started to arise, three conflicts actually, man vs. man, self, and society. It was man vs. man because well it is in the Vietnam War, so you are continuously assailed by the images of soldiers and their injuries. Man Vs. self was internal, in Mary Ann and in Fossie; Mary Ann lost the battle because she succumbed to the sensations of war and became addicted to it. Fossie started to win, when he decided to send Mary Ann home. And Man Vs. society because everyone but the greenies thought that because she was a woman that she couldn’t kill someone, could wear human tongue necklaces…they were VERY wrong…this is my favorite scene so far because of the emotions behind it, Fossie brought Mary Ann over because he missed her, Mary Ann didn’t want to feel helpless so she learned how to be a field nurse, then how to shoot a rifle, and then how to move like the greenies, and finally she, well she became feral, yeah feral is really the only word that comes to mind when I think of Mary Ann…this scene is connected to the main Character conflict of man Vs. self because it shows that anyone from a hardened soldier to a pretty woman from back stateside, can go down a road that you can’t turn around from, and that is what the narrator is afraid of. He is afraid of going down that road and whether or not he already has…