Mary Anne Bell

Mary Anne Bell represents home, purity and what waits for soldiers, however pretending/fantasizing about what’s behind is dangerous, because it’s not reality. Her love isn’t returned (like when Vietnam vets returned home to anger instead of thanks).
She is Mark Fossie’s high school sweetheart. Although Mary Anne arrives in Vietnam full of innocence, she gains respect for death and the darkness of the jungle and, according to legend, disappears there. Unlike Martha and Henry Dobbins’s girlfriend, who only serve as fantasy reminders of a world removed from Vietnam, Mary Anne is a strong and realized character who shatters Fossie’s fantasy of finding comfort in his docile girlfriend.

Mary Anne Bell was no timid child. She was curious about things. During her first days in-country, she liked to roam around the compound asking questions: What exactly was a trip flare? How did a Claymore work? What was behind those scary green mountains to the west? Then she'd squint and listen quietly while somebody filled her in. She had a good quick mind. She paid attention. Often, especially during the hot afternoons, she would spend time with the ARVNs out along the perimeter, picking up little phrases of Vietnamese, learning how to cook rice over a can of Sterno, how to eat with her hands. The guys sometimes liked to kid her about it—our own little native, they'd say—but Mary Anne would just smile and stick out her tongue. "I'm here," she'd say, "I might as well learn something."

For Mary Anne Bell, it seemed, Vietnam had the effect of a powerful drug: that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure that comes as the needle slips in and you know you're risking something. The endorphins start to flow, and the adrenaline and you hold your breath and creep quietly through the moonlit nightscapes; you become intimate with danger; you're in touch with the far side of yourself, as though it's another hemisphere, and you want to string it out and go wherever the trip takes you and be host to all the possibilities inside yourself.