The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam

“To buoy himself up, Kien sometimes tried to concentrate on uplifting memories. But no matter how hard he tried to revive the scenes, they wouldn’t stay. It was hopeless. His whole life from the very beginning, from childhood to the army, seemed detached and apart from him, floating in a void.”

Before the war ended, Kien saw all his friends die. He was camped in the Jungle of Screaming Souls where most of his regiment had been killed, and he himself had been wounded. The jungle itself was supposedly haunted, and being back there has robbed Kien of any hope. In a firefight just a few days before, Kien had walked, without firing, right into enemy fire, hoping to die. Even the good moments of his life have been corrupted by his memories, by his surroundings, and by his lack of hope.

“No one spoke of Can again. No one bothered to find out why he had died, whether he was killed or had just exhausted himself in the jungle, or whether he’d committed suicide. No one accused him, either.

The name, age, and image of someone who’d been every bit as brave under fire as his comrades, who had set a fine example, suddenly disappeared without a trace.”

Can, after growing depressed with the war and the endless fighting, says his life is slipping away from him, so he deserts. He writes a letter to his mother to tell her he is coming home, but is already dead by the time her return letter reaches Kien. The military police who find his body bury him in the jungle. Because he deserts, his friends cannot even remember him—he simply disappears, and the jungle grows over him, as if he never existed. His fate, the author is saying, is the same fate as all who died during the war. His life meant nothing. The jungle still went on forever, and the war still went on without him.

“I’m not trying to say anything. I’m simply a soldier like you who’ll 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 with your normal voice, in the normal way again.”

War changes men. It changes the way they think, the way they look, even the way they talk. Kien will never rid himself of the memories of war, of the jungle, of the things he did and the things he saw. As the novels begins, he is returning to the Jungle of Screaming Souls even after the war is over, a sure sign that he will always be returning to the things he did and saw during wartime, always returning to the jungle. 

“Sure, thinks Kien, it’s hard to forget. When will I calm down? When will my heart be free of the tight grip of war? Whether pleasant or ugly memories, they are there to stay for ten, twenty years, perhaps forever.

From now on life may always be dark, full of suffering, with brief moments of happiness. Living somewhere between a dream world and reality, on the knife-edge between the two.”

Kien’s memories, even after the war is over, constantly surface. He is constantly reliving the war, because as part of the Missing in Action Remains Team, he is still forced to revisit the jungle. But already, however, he is not sure what is real and what is not. Like the memories he had while smoking canina to escape the world, he realizes he is balanced precariously, too afraid to remember the past but also afraid of the present because of the impact his past has on it as memories return to him unbidden.

“Often in the middle of a busy street, in broad daylight, I’ve suddenly become lost in a daydream. On smelling the stink of rotten meat I’ve suddenly imagined I was back crossing Hamburger Hill in 1972, walking over strewn corpses. The stench of death is often so overpowering I have to stop in the middle of the pavement, holding my nose, while startled, suspicious people step around me, avoiding my mad stare.”

 Kien has already established that his memories come to him unbidden. Here, he hints at two things. The first is that any sound or sight or smell can trigger the memories. He never knows when they will come, and he never knows what will trigger them. Later, he will say that writing brings back the memories, but here he is saying anything can. He is also saying that people who did not fight in the war cannot understand those who did. When the memories come over him, other people avoid him. They think him mad. They walk around him, none of them understanding, none of them stopping to help.

“Every evening, before sitting at his desk and opening his manuscript, he tries to generate the appropriate atmosphere, the right feeling. He tries to separate each problem, the problem of paragraphs and pages, wishing to finish them in a specific way and by a specific time. He plans the sequences in his mind. What his heroes will do and what they will say in a particular circumstance. How they’ll meet, how they’ll part. He lays the design of them out in his mind before taking up the pen.

But the act of writing blurs his neat designs, finally washing them away altogether, or blurs them so the lines become intermixed and sequences lose their order.”

At times, the point of view of the novel switches from Kien to a distant, omniscient narrator describing Kien. This is the first mention of Kien writing a novel. It is also an explanation of the non-chronological structure of the novel itself, as well as a commentary on how memory works. Kien tries to write his memories in sequence, but memories don’t always work that way: Kien remembering one scene reminds him of another scene, so the structure—memory itself—becomes jumbled. He tries to approach war logically, but there’s no logic to it, and so his memory, and his writing, blur, as does the line between real and imagined, between ghosts and real people, between the present and the past.

“After all his trial essays, short stories, and novellas comes this novel, which he suddenly realizes is his last adventure as a soldier. Curious, for it is at the same time his most serious challenge in life; in writing this work he has driven himself to the brink of insanity. There is no escape, no savior to help him. He alone must meet this writing challenge, his last duty as a soldier.”

Kien has set himself the task of chronicling the war: the deaths, the sorrow, the way it destroyed so many lives. He wants the long chapter of his life as a soldier to end, and he sees this as his last duty. But by delving back into his memories of war, he is still fighting the war. He can’t walk down the street without being cast back into some battle. He sees girls on the streets and is reminded of girls he knew during the war. His life is divided by the war, and he is still living in the war itself, unable to break free. He is still doing his duty as a soldier. He is still stuck in the war, only now the war is with himself, and his memories, in the form of the novel he is writing.

“Months passed. The novel seemed to have its own logic, its own flow. It seemed from then on to structure itself, to take its own time, to make its own detours. As for Kien, he was just the writer: the novel seemed to be in charge and he meekly accepted that, mixing his own fate with that of his heroes, passively letting the stream of his novel flow as it would, following the course of some mystical logic set by his memory or imagination.”

Kien realizes he is not in control of his life. The novel has become his life, but he is not in control of it any more than he is in control of his memories. He has already mentioned how memories come to him unbidden. He has said his memories come out of order, that past and present blur, which means that he is still living in the past, still trying to make sense of his memories, still trying to make sense of war. But again, he can’t control his memories, which means he can’t control the novel.

“The sorrow of war inside a soldier’s heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would become a tearing pain.”

Kien has already said he can’t control the structure of the novel. Here, he says to focus on any one event would be too painful. He is explaining why the structure of the novel is so jumbled up: every time he focuses too long on any one event, it becomes too painful. Each smaller storyline in the novel—his love of Phuong, the battle in the Jungle of Screaming Souls, finding the dead girl at the airport—is told in small pieces. He circles back to them again and again, giving a little more of the story each time, because to focus on one event for too long causes him too much pain.

“The manuscript pages were heaped in random order in the mute girl’s attic quarters. These flimsy pages represented Kien’s past; the lines told stories that were sometimes clear, but most were at best obscure and vague and pale as twilight. They told stories from the precariously fine border dividing life and death, blurring the line itself and finally erasing it. Ages and times were mixed in confusion, as were peace and war. 

The conflicts continued from the lines on pages into the real life of the author; the fighting refused to die. 

The personalities, both alive and dead, breathed and spoke to the author in his special world where everyone he had known still lived and walked and smiled and ate and joked and dreamed and loved.”

Kien is trying to write his loved ones back to life. He keeps saying his novel is his sacred duty. So far, he has meant it is his duty to tell the world about the war. But as he says here, war and peace become mixed—he is telling the reader they cannot understand war without understanding the peace that war took away. The reader will not be able to understand the depth of loss without understanding what it is that was lost.

“‘Now,’ he said, equally clearly, ‘I don’t know what to do with the mountain of papers.’ He meant his novel. Now that he had written it he had no use for it. Whatever devils he had needed to rid himself of had gone. The novel was the ash from his exorcism of devils.

Kien had written for the sake of writing, not to publish.”

Kien had been writing so that it would help him. He mentions several times he has a sacred duty, but here he sees that others won’t understand. He realizes he has been writing for himself. Writing helped him bring his friends back to life; it helped him understand the war better; more importantly, it helped him understand what he had lost. But now that he has finished, he sees it as ash, in the same way he sees everything as ash: burned, gray, easily blown away. He is also alluding to his father, who burned his paintings because his paintings weren’t understood by the working class. Kien sees the same thing here: the working class just wants to move on from the war, but Kien never can.

“There was still too much to do. He had the burden of his generation, a debt to repay before dying. It would be tragic and unjust in the extreme if he were to pass away, to be buried deep in the wet earth, carrying with him the history of his generation. If only he could shed all other needs of everyday living and concentrate all his energies into writing, his task would be over sooner. He would then be released from the burden of life and float freely on the stream to his journey’s end, where countless familiar souls awaited him.”

Kien’s duty to write his novel becomes one of the main themes. But several times he has led the reader to believe he is capturing the war, when in reality he is trying to capture an entire generation: those his age, like Phuong and Hien and Sinh and everyone who died during the war or could not cope after. He is trying to capture the peace before the war to show what his generation lost. He is trying to capture “the history of his generation.” He uses the word “generation” twice in one paragraph, as well as the word “burden.” He is telling the reader the history of his generation is a burden on everyone who lived through it.

“It was that connection with the long-gone nurse and her likeness to Phuong that brought back events and images he wished to forget. Even when he knew it was Phuong and not the nurse, just her words, her profile, were enough to trigger the same violent memories.”

Several times throughout the novel Kien says a woman reminds him of Phuong. Here, it is a nurse who cares for him when he is deathly ill. In his delusions, he thinks she is Phuong, so much so that any time he remembers her, he remembers Phuong. Kien’s peacetime memories—his last moments before the war began—are of Phuong. In the hospital, he thinks he is dying, so he thinks of Phuong. His last moments with Phuong before the war made him think of dying—twice, he was too scared to sleep with her, worried for what would happen to her, worried for what would happen to himself—so since it is the war that separates him from Phuong, he associates the start of the war with the death of their relationship, which means that when he thinks of death, he thinks of Phuong.

“Later he decided it was a foolish idea. A fictional replacement for his true stories. But it did have the soothing effect of sustaining his interest in writing. After these encounters he would return and start work again.”

While walking the streets, Kien contemplates making up stories. Later, he decides not to. He wants his stories to be true. He wants to capture the true nature of war, his experience in war, and its effect on his country. The author here, Bao Ninh, is delving into the difference between fiction and nonfiction. The novel is fiction, but the author constantly has his main character writing of his experiences, as the author’s war experiences are similar to Kien’s: he served in the 27th Youth Brigade and, like Kien, was one of only ten men to survive. Ninh is drawing on his experiences both as a soldier and a writer, and by giving his main character a background similar to his, by delving into the difference between fiction and nonfiction, he blurs the lines between what happened and what did not happen, in the same way Kien constantly says his memories are blurred between past and present, that the lines become intermixed, and the sequences lose their order.

“Postwar Hanoi, in reality, was not like his jungle dreams. The streets revealed an unbroken, monotonous sorrow and suffering. There were joys, but those images blinked on and off like cheap flashing lights in a shop window. There was a shared loneliness in poverty, and in his everyday walks he felt this mood in the stream of people he walked with. Another idea that emerged during his long walks was flashed into his mind by a written sign: ‘Leave!’”

As Kien wanders the streets of Hanoi, he sees suffering everywhere. Everything is cheap. Part of this image of Hanoi is colored by his own suffering. But part of it is also that the country, and the city, is suffering after the war in the same way Kien is, Phuong is, Sinh is—everyone in the novel has been afflicted with sorrow because of the war. The items are cheap, the people are in poverty, and there is little hope except, as Kien sees it, to leave. In Kien’s case, this means retreating into drink or his manuscript, and part of the sorrow he feels is knowing that everyone is wishing for some kind of retreat from life in Vietnam after the war. His novel is not just a novel of his own experiences—it is a novel of North Vietnam, as the subtitle states, and the author Bao Ninh is trying to capture the sorrow of North Vietnam after the war by describing it through Kien’s eyes.

“Vuong went into a steep dive, reflecting his trauma. It was sad, almost unbelievable, that such a tough and courageous fighter could fall so quickly in the postwar days. His friends said he had hit one pothole too many. But they said it with sadness, not in jest. After a while he became a ragged, beggarly drunk.”

Vuong, like Kien and all the other soldiers at the café, turns to alcohol. Kien shares Vuong’s story to show how easy it is after the war to turn to alcohol for comfort, but he is also showing the pain soldiers feel. At the café, all the soldiers look to alcohol or women to ease their sorrows. Vuong’s memories, like Kien’s, haunt him. He remembers running over bodies in his tank, but now, he says, they run over him. And, Kien says, there are many others like him, caught in the treads of the past.  

“From now on it was nostalgia and war recollections that drove him on. With Phuong gone this was his only hope of staying in rhythm with normal life. The sorrows of war and his nostalgia drove him down into the depths of his imagination. From there his writing could take substance.”

Several times Kien mentions he has a duty to finish his novel. But here, he says it’s the sorrow of war that gives his writing substance; since writing is the only reason he still lives, then it’s the writing—the recollection of memories and the attempt to make sense of them—that gives his life substance. He is living for his memories.

“The sailor lowered his gun, softened his stance, and sat down with them. ‘No. Don’t stop singing. That’s got to go on at all costs. Sing us a song now,’ he invited.”

Just before the war begins, the sailor tells Phuong to sing—that singing has to continue. He knows the war will soon begin and he says that music—and the reader can infer all art—must continue, because they will need the hope that music supplies in the war to come. Kien has just said that his writing gives his life substance. He doesn’t have much hope, but if his life has substance through art, then there is hope. Ninh is reminding the reader that through art there is hope.

“Not one of them asked about Hoa. At first he found it disagreeably strange. Then, with its acceptance he too began to forget about her. Was it that such sacrifices were now an everyday occurrence? Or that they were expected, even of such young people? Or worse, that they were too concerned worrying about their own safety to bother with others?”

The latter parts of the novel deal with sacrifice, in regard not only to the individuals who give their lives and well-being for others, but the sacrifices the country gives up during the war. The power goes out in the cities often, either because of outages or because the lights have to be turned off to prevent bomb attacks. Kien’s father sacrifices his art. Phuong quits playing the piano, sacrificing her art; she also sacrifices herself in the first bombing attack of the war, when she is raped. All of them sacrifice themselves. Kien is never the same after the war. What would have otherwise been a selfless moment, when Hoa saves Kien and the other injured, becomes just another everyday occurrence, hardly even worthy of being remembered. Kien thinks this is just another of the sorrows of war.

“But for Hoa and countless other loved comrades, nameless ordinary soldiers, those who sacrificed for others and for their Vietnam, raising the name of Vietnam high and proud, creating a spiritual beauty in the horrors of conflict, the war would been another brutal, sadistic exercise.

Kien himself would have been dead long ago if it had not been for the sacrifice of others; he might even have killed himself to escape the psychological burden of killing others. He had not done that, choosing instead to live the life of an antlike soldier, carrying the burden of every underling.”

Kien has just said that Hoa’s sacrifice was one of so many it became an everyday occurrence. He also said it was hardly worth remembering. But here Kien contradicts himself—he remembers every sacrifice, knowing that each one allowed him to live. This is why, then, he sees it as his duty to finish his book: to show the sacrifices, the sorrows, the war caused, and to remember them as a spiritual beauty.

“In later years Kien experienced several similar, even identical moments, 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.”

Kien describes here how the war robs people of their will to live. After the atrocities, the deaths, the rapes, the brutal horrors, they grow immune to feelings, because feelings force them to live, and to live is too painful. After the war, Kien often seeks this numbness through alcohol—he drinks to the point of blacking out, so he will feel nothing. Many of the other veteran soldiers do the same. Phuong becomes a prostitute because she feels she is unclean, but by prostituting herself, she can shut down her feelings.

“‘Maybe it was our soldiers,’ she replied. ‘Soldiers do this sort of thing. War does this, war smashes and destroys.’”

Phuong knows by now that there are no differences in the soldiers. It doesn’t matter what side they are on. Soldiers kill and destroy. War kills and destroys. Vietnamese fighting Vietnamese means that only the uniforms are different; the country, and the people in it, will be destroyed.

“There would be a miracle, he had written. A miracle that would allow people to emerge unchanged from the war. So, despite the horrors of war, despite the cruelties, the humiliations, despite all the ridiculous prejudices and dogma which pervaded everyone’s life, his Phuong would remain young forever. She would be untainted by war. She would be forever beautiful. No one would ever come close to her beauty. She was like a green meadow after spring rains […] She was passionate, untamed, magnetic, with that same miraculous and unfathomable beauty, a beauty that made the heart ache; a vulnerable, innocent beauty forever on the brink of the abyss of destruction. That would be his miracle: Phuong would be untouched, unchanged.”

Kien has said several times that people he knew from the war live in his memory—they live in his book. He can choose to remember them as they were, alive, unchanged, untainted by war. If he chooses to remember Phuong as she was before the war, this is how he’ll remember her. She will be unchanged.