What happens in Chapter 9 of The Things They Carried?
Rat Kiley tells the tale of Mark Fossie, a soldier who arranges for his girlfriend, Mary Anne Bell, to be flown secretly into the Vietnam base camp. When Mary Anne arrives, she embodies the all-American girl—blonde, curious, and cheerful—and quickly wins over the men. However, the Vietnam experience starts to change her. She learns to cook Vietnamese dishes, picks up the language, accompanies medics on sick calls, and eventually begins sneaking out at night with the Green Berets, a covert Special Forces unit operating from a place filled with incense and decay. Fossie tries to regain control—they briefly become re-engaged—but Mary Anne ultimately disappears into the jungle with the Green Berets. When Fossie confronts her in the Berets' hooch, she’s wearing a necklace made of human tongues. She confesses that she has fallen in love with the war itself: its smell, its darkness, and its sheer vibrancy. The last anyone sees of her is as she heads alone into the mountains, never to be found again. Rat presents this story as something he heard secondhand, openly admitting to the gaps and embellishments, which Mitchell Sanders questions throughout.
Analysis
O'Brien employs Rat Kiley's unreliable narration as both a structural tool and a thematic argument: the story’s acknowledged gaps don’t detract from its truth — they are its truth. This chapter flips the traditional gender dynamic found in war narratives. Mary Anne steps in as the feminine counterpoint to masculine violence, yet it is she who experiences the most profound transformation, while Fossie, the soldier, stays unchanged and domestic. O'Brien is intentionally breaking down the notion that war's corruption is inherently male, whether biologically or culturally.
The Green Berets' hooch acts as a threshold space — liminal, sensory, almost ritualistic — where the war’s darkest desires are contained. The necklace of human tongues serves as O'Brien's most striking symbol: language literally silenced, turned into trophies, and worn. It indicates Mary Anne's complete immersion into a pre-verbal, instinctual realm that the war demands.
Tonal shifts are meticulously orchestrated. The chapter begins in the style of a campfire story — Rat's voice is loose, meandering, and self-interrupting — before tightening into something resembling myth or fable. Sanders's interjections ("Hear me out," "You can't say that") maintain the metafictional perspective, reminding the reader that all war stories are crafted, negotiated, and contested. The chapter also continues O'Brien's recurring theme of burdens: Mary Anne sheds everything she brought from home — pink sweater, engagement ring, girlhood — and is ultimately unburdened, or unraveled, by the war's weight replacing her own.
Key quotes from Chapter 9
“She was just a girl, he kept saying. A girl, that's all. But then after a moment he shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'She wasn't.'”
Fossie attempts to explain Mary Anne's transformation to Rat, and the self-correction captures the chapter's central rupture: the girl he imported into the war no longer exists.
“'I want to eat this place. Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country — the dirt, the death — I just want to eat it and have it there inside me.'”
Mary Anne speaks to Fossie inside the Green Berets' hooch, articulating her desire not to observe the war but to be consumed by and consume it — a hunger that has entirely displaced her former self.
“When she moved, she moved silently and without the old nervousness. No quick smiles, no laughter. She was wearing her culottes, the same pink sweater, but now it seemed wrong somehow.”
An early marker of Mary Anne's shift, O'Brien using the unchanged clothing against the changed body language to show how the familiar can become uncanny.