“And then one morning, all alone, Mary Anne went off into the mountains and never returned” (110). Tim O'Brien's short story “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” features an all-American girl who has been held back by social and behavioral norms, clinging to an identity that she has been deprived of the ability to develop. The water of the Song Tra Bong removes Mary Anne's previous idea of ​​being as if she "stopped for a 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, claims to be happy and self-aware. The men of Alpha Company argue for virtue in that Mary Anne was “gone” (107) and that what she was becoming “was dangerous…ready to kill” (112). They didn't want to accept a woman becoming something other than what women had always been. In “How Tell to a True War Story” we are told that a true war story “does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior” (65). Mary Anne hasn't really gone "dark," because for her this isn't a story about war; this is the story of a woman trying to overcome gender roles and men's inability to accept them. As Mary Anne begins to interact with the land and material culture of war, we are introduced to her curious nature. She “listened intently” (91) and was intrigued by the land and its mystery. At first Vietnam was like Elroy Berdahl to her in the sense that he didn't talk, he didn't judge, he was just there. Vietnam saved Mary Anne's life. Like Elroy, “[Vietnam] was the t…center of the paper…beauty, law in anarchy, civilization in savagery…the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity” (78). According to the truth of the story Mary Anne succumbed to the darkness and became cold, but the truth of the story does not matter. The absolute truth is much darker and sadder than that. Mary Anne struggled to define herself in a place that gave her opportunity. Fossie's stubbornness and inability to accept Mary Anne's journey, however, led to her being consumed by an ambiguous darkness. Is the final truth for Mary Anne similar to that of Curt Lemon? If “[o]ne thing [can] happen and be a total lie; [and] another thing might not happen and be truer than the truth” (80), then perhaps the final truth for Mary Anne was that she truly “knew exactly who [she was]” (106). The ending to Mary Anne's story might have been nice and civilized for her, but ugly and chaotic for you, and that was her liberation..