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The first reason is because when Mary arrived she was clueless as to what she was gonna find in Vietnam. She was a reminder, for the soldiers, of the comfort back home and the innocence they too had before the war. War can cause anyone to lose themselves and who they were because they are losing their innocence. For example, as Rat Kiley ends his story, of Mary Anne Bell abruptly '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' (O’Brien 114). This quote summarizes the point of the chapter: loss of innocence through war. O'Brien states the true effect of war on an individual and how it corrupts anyone, regardless of gender, to the point where there is a complete detachment from the person who once was and the person who is now. The use of the word 'never' merely emphasizes that the effect of war is everlasting and that the memories of it will always remain in the minds of those who lived it, in the form of stories that will consolidate whenever there is a sense of loneliness in life. In the context of the chapter, the expression 'you get dirty' suggests that as a soldier you are exposed to the burden of taking the life away from a human, of lighting up a fire, of killing an innocent. You are exposed to the fear of dying, of not being quick enough to fire your shotgun, and you are exposed to the fear of becoming a ferocious creature like Mary Anne, one with no soul or heart but only hardness and sorrow.
The second reason is that because Mary saw the true nature of war, she, unlike the rest of the male soldiers, was able to gain an appreciation of war and the whole nature of it. She was consumed by the war. For instance, Mark Fossie, her boyfriend, and Rat Kiley, the narrator of this story, find who seems to be Mary Anne with the green barea. Rat describes the exact moment when they see the changed Mary. 'At least for a moment, she seemed to be the same pretty young girl who had arrived a few weeks earlier...She wore her pink sweater and a white blouse and a simple cotton skirt...It took a few seconds, Rat said, to appreciate the full change. In part, it was her eyes: utterly flat and indifferent. There was no emotion in her stare, no sense of the person behind it. But the grotesque part, he said was her jewelry. At the girl's throat was a necklace of human tongues' (pg. 110). This quote illustrates how the war changed Mary. The fact that Mary l is still wearing her 'pink sweater and a white blouse and a simple cotton skirt' suggests that there was still a part of her that held on to who she was, the sweet, lovable, and comforting girl, on the day she arrived in Vietnam. However, the fact that her eyes were now 'utterly flat and indifferent' and at her throat, there was a necklace of human tongues' shows how war has corrupted her. The contrast between the clothing to the jewelry emphasizes the idea that war transforms the innocence of a human being and converts him or her into a beast-like character.
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