The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam

In the rainy season of 1975, Kien and the truck driver of the Missing In Action-Remains Gathering Team return to the Jungle of Screaming Souls. During the war, Kien’s 27th Battalion fought in a battle that killed all but ten of their battalion, and Kien is haunted by the memories. As he lies down to sleep in the back of the truck with the remains of over fifty bodies, he thinks back to the battle where so many were killed, and he was wounded. After the battle, the bodies bloated and blood ran red into the rivers, and there are those now who say the jungle is haunted by the souls of the dead. Kien has returned to claim the bodies of the dead from the jungle, but his memories return with him. As he tries to sleep he remembers playing cards with the other members of his platoon. He remembers smoking canina, a marijuana-like root, and the pleasant dreams it gave the men who smoked it. Kien’s memories—all their memories—are tainted by the war and what they’ve seen, so they smoke to forget everything. Kien remembers Can deserting, and how Can was found dead weeks later. He remembers how the others died. He remembers waking in the night to see his men slipping off to a farmhouse to meet three girls who lived there for late-night trysts, and he remembers how the girls were kidnapped and murdered by ARVN commandos. He remembers ambushing the commandos, killing three of them and forcing the other four to dig their own graves. When the truck driver wakes him up because he’s been screaming, the truck driver tells Kien he won’t ever be free of the memories of war.