The Sorrow of War

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I have read some literature written by my former enemies. At the top of my personal list of favorites is Bảo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War .

The discontent on his return was his inability to overcome the inner hollowness of his life. Unable to connect any of the threads to his prewar life, he was adrift in the realities of postwar Vietnam. The protagonist in The Sorrow of War, Kien, wanted something more. He faltered in his attempts. Another veteran speaks of their dilemma.I never succumbed to the fabrication of some Americans that “life didn’t mean as much to the Vietnamese.” I treated too many civilian war casualties not to see their agony. The Sorrow of War gives a glimpse into the soul of a North Vietnamese soldier. It is not so different from my own. Kien laments the fact that war means an altering of morality, an inversion of what being a good person is supposed to bring about. Oanh was good in that he let the woman he was supposed to kill go, but he was not rewarded for this; rather, he was killed for being "sympathetic." If a person in war wants to give in to their natural impulse of mercy, they may very well be rewarded for it with death. War suppresses all human sentiment of compassion and grace, rendering people automata. As mentioned above, Kien's novel is not linear. He comes to write with plans that defeat him, ideas that fizzle out, and intentions that shift. He seems unable to control the novel, often personifying it to suggest its control over him. He does not really get to say what form it takes or what content is included or elided. This is not problematic, though, for this is exactly the form of writing that helps Kien start to move through his deeply troubling and complicated memories. He would never have been able to use a novel's traditional form to make sense of what he did and saw, but this sort of unconscious writing moves him through his trauma and closer to a space beyond it. Kien is a very human and relatable character in that he often contradicts himself. In this quote, he cannot believe the man at the airport wanted to murder the other man because he violated the corpse, but earlier in the war, he had wanted to shoot Hoa because she could not immediately find the right way to get to the path they needed. This highlights that war is messy and complicated, and a soldier cannot always predict how they will respond or what the right thing to do or think in a certain moment might be.

And that second's hesitation was paid for with the life of the only other scout still alive in his unit. Narrator, 180

As a writer, Ninh captures the essence of the emptiness and loneliness of returning and the inability to reconstruct the joys of one’s past before the war. Far more is lost than the innocence of youth.

Kien explains that he's not sharing all of this for nothing; he's trying to capture the horror of war because he feels the reader will likely not understand how terrifying it really was. He shares battle stories and writes about the deaths of his loved ones and comrades, even as he hoped when he began the novel that it could be about the postwar period and not the ordeal of the war itself. The novel does prove cathartic for Kien, to some extent. My two brothers, my classmates, and my husband, too, were all younger than you, and joined up years later than you. But none of them has returned. From so many, there is only you left, Kien. Just you." Lan, 53 In later years Kien experienced…long periods of withdrawal. Like the dead, one felt no fear, no enthusiasm, no joy, no sadness, no feelings for anything. No concerns and no hopes. One was totally devoid of feeling, and had no regard for the clever or the stupid, the brave or the cowardly, commanders or privates, friend or foe, life or death, happiness or sadness. It was all the same; it amounted to nothing.” The very characteristics of his spirit, his eccentricities, his free-flying artistic expressions and disregard for normal rules that annoyed others, were what attracted Phuong to him; she was a kindred soul. Narrator, 129The unnamed narrator at the end, who may be Bao Ninh in some capacity, says he and Kien have the same sorrow and the same fate, yet while the narrator has found a way to live in the present, Kien has found a way to live in the past. This is not a criticism or a commentary on any "weakness" of Kien's that he cannot stay in the present or hope for the future; rather it is a commendation that Kien has embraced the memories of before the war in a way that embraces that recognizes painful experiences as nurturing, sustaining, and valuable. I do not mean to make this a discussion of the physical hardships of war. The internal damages last so much longer. It does lead to another observation. While the most profound aspects of The Sorrow of War delve into the psychological universals experienced in war, the Vietnamese troops were immersed in a flora familiar to them. They not only knew the culture and language of the villages, they knew the jungle. From a psychological perspective, The Sorrow of War explores the ramifications of living with the consequences of war, the PTSD, survivor’s guilt and moral injury. Some families lost every son to the war; villages were depleted of their youth. Daughters were not spared on the battlefield or in love lost. Years of separation turned permanent when men never returned. Kien could never regain or replace the lost love of a childhood sweetheart. Both are too damaged by the war.

But Kien is not actually still in 1975. Rather, he has returned to his nearly apocalyptic experiences of trauma for the specific purpose of finishing his novel. It has been decades since the war ended, but Kien can re-experience it all as if he were still there. Kien remembers the horrors of fighting, the senselessness of it all given that peace was hollow and disillusioning, and the devastation the war brought to his community: friends were killed; survivors were left bereft and uncomprehending; his treasured love, Phuong, was brutally gang-raped at the beginning of the war, a trauma that forever divided her from Kien and doomed their chance for real postwar love. I would bet Tim O’Brien didn’t consider his C-rations outstanding, but grunts had a lot of discomforts to worry about before they even got to the combat. Protein starved, and sometimes without enough rations, it must have been excruciating for the NVA. I’m simply a soldier like you who’ll now have to live with broken dreams and with pain. But, my friend, our era is finished. After this hard-won victory fighters like you, Kien, will never be normal again. You won’t even speak in your normal voice, in the normal way again.” verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Kien, a young soldier from Hanoi, has become part of the Missing-In-Action team in the year after the Vietnam War. He is tasked with the clean-up and treatment of the bodies and remains of bodies in the “Jungle of Screaming Souls.” In the aftermath of the recently ended war, Kien and his friends attempt to forget the horrors and atrocities they have witnessed, all while literally burying the dead. His whole life from beginning, from childhood to the army, seemed detached and apart from him, floating in a void. Narrator, 16 Victory was meaningless without reconciling the sorrow of war with Kien’s life going forward. The memories would not allow it as they dominated his conscious mind and took over the imagery of his dreams.