Tra Bong's Love Song as a Metaphor The Vietnam War is a strange and inexplicable event in American history. The controversies surrounding American involvement in Vietnam and the need for Vietnam veterans to tell their war stories are prevalent in post-Vietnam American culture. “The stories that will last forever are the ones that swirl back and forth across the line between curiosity and bedlam, madness and banal” (89). The Story of the Lover of Tra Bong's Song explains that this quote from the veterans' stories never makes an exact sense, but they are stories of a war that never even made an exact sense. The story of "Tra Bong's Love Song," which involves a young girl who comes to Vietnam for her boyfriend, becomes a metaphor for the rite of passage that a young soldier would experience during his service in Vietnam. The other soldiers in the infirmary The detachment was shocked and amazed by the arrival of Mary Anne, Mark Fossie's girlfriend. She arrived in typical American glory, with her "strawberry ice cream complexion" and in a somewhat lost and tired daze. His journey was a myriad of flight connections and stopovers. Even in his arrival we see a metaphor for how a soldier would arrive in Vietnam. The exact arrival of soldiers in the war is a matter of somewhat confusing and shocking debate. Mary Anne was only seventeen when she arrived in Vietnam, but the soldiers fighting were not much older than her, many were exactly the same age. After the initial shock of landing in Vietnam wore off, Mary Anne became curious about her surroundings and what was happening during the war. This is also what a young soldier would experience during his first days of service, and he was trying to u... middle of paper ......but the narrator's hidden thoughts and feelings are the real things that need to be examined. The Vietnam War is so full of uncertainties that its meaning and questions about why still linger in the minds of U.S. citizens. While this interpretation of the metaphor is not one that many subscribe to when reading the story for the first time, it is one that deserves some attention. The story can be seen as the transformation of the soldier while serving in Vietnam. This story explains some of the smaller battles the soldiers faced. They fought for their identity, killing and survival. All of these battles can be seen through Mary Anne and her tracks while she was in Vietnam. Mary Anne's story ends with her leaving for the jungle of Vietnam never to be seen again, and this happens to soldiers, they will always have Vietnam inside them.