“And then one morning, all alone, Mary Anne went to the mountains and did not come back” (110). Tim O'Brien's short story "The Sweetheart of Tra Bong" presents an all-American girl who has been held back by social and behavioral norms - searching for an identity that she has not had the ability to achieve. develop. The water of the Song Tra Bong removes Mary Anne's former notion that she "stopped to swim" (92). With her roles erased, Mary Anne becomes obsessed with the land and mystery of Vietnam and is allowed to discover herself. Through the lenses of Mark Fossie and the men of Alpha Company, Mary Anne becomes an animal and is completely unrecognizable by the end of the story. Mary Anne, however, states that she is happy and self-aware. The men of Alpha Company defend virtue in that Mary Anne was “gone” (107) and what she was becoming “was dangerous…ready to be killed” (112). They did not want to accept that a woman becomes something different from what she has always been. In “How to Tell a Real War Story,” we are told that a real war story “neither instructs nor encourages virtue, nor suggests models of proper human behavior” (65). Mary Anne hasn't really gone "dark," because for her, it's not a war story; it is the story of a woman trying to overcome gender roles and the inability of men to accept them. When Mary Anne begins to interact with the land and material culture of war, we discover her curious nature. She “listened attentively” (91) and was intrigued by the country and its mystery. At the beginning, Vietnam was like Elroy Berdahl for her in the sense that he didn't speak, he didn't judge, he was just there. Vietnam saved Mary Anne's life. Like Elroy, “[Vietnam] was the middle of paper……water, law into anarchy, civility into savagery…the only certainty is crushing ambiguity” (78). According to the truth of the story, Mary Anne gave in to darkness and became cold, but the truth of the story doesn't matter. The absolute truth is much darker and sadder than that. Mary Anne struggled to define herself in a place that gave her the opportunity. Fossie's stubbornness and inability to accept Mary Anne's journey, however, led to her being consumed by ambiguous darkness. Is the final truth for Mary Anne similar to that of Curt Lemon? If “[a] thing [can] happen and be a complete lie; [and] something else may not happen and be truer than the truth” (80), so perhaps the final truth for Mary Anne was that she “knew exactly who [she] was” (106). The end of Mary Anne's story might have been beautiful and civil for her, but ugly and chaotic for you, and that was her liberation..