O'Brien blurs the borders between male and female, nature and civilization, truth and fiction, and the rational and the irrational by telling a story about a girl who goes to Vietnam to be with her boyfriend and she changes into a crazy person and is never the same. In the end, she went into the forest never to be found again. O'Brien blurs the borders between male and female by having the girl who is trying to uncover the mystery of her identity to act as a man, as one of the soldiers. She becomes one of the Greenies and wears a necklace of human tongues and sings in a foreign language. She learns the ways of the camp like learning how to put morphine into people and how to amputate people's body parts.