The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam

Thinking of Phuong, and the train they took south, reminds Kien of meeting Hien on the peace train, and also of the end of the war. But this memory brings him right back to thinking about Phuong, and the train south. Phuong, on the train, wants Kien to make love to her. He is about to respond to her advances when they hear airplanes overhead diving for an attack on the train. In the confusion of the attacking planes, Kien loses Phuong. He sees her for a moment with a big man on top of her, holding her down, but a bomb strike knocks him unconscious. He can’t find the freight car Phuong was in, so he jumps on the locomotive as the train starts up again. The engineer tells him this is only the first strike of the war, but from that moment, remembering the man on top of Phuong, Kien thinks he has truly lost her. 

Kien next remembers some of the other people he has lost. He thinks, in his memory, that Phuong sacrificed herself for him, so he remembers others who did as well. He remembers Oanh, who died in the police station at Buon Me Thuot. He remembers Cu and Big Thinh, and Tam, scouts who died in the jungles escaping from the Americans. And he remembers Hoa, a guide who, after getting them lost in the jungle, sacrifices herself to redeem her mistake. When an American patrol comes upon Hoa and Kien, she shoots the search dog so Kien can get away. The Americans catch her and rape her, and when Kien returns to the area many years later with the MIA team, he thinks of those who sacrificed themselves for him. He also thinks of several unrelated moments: a man selling cobras in the city, the people who ask him about his writing, and of a small plantation he visited during the war. It was a peaceful, idyllic plantation, run by an old man from the north, and Kien, in a small moment of respite from his devastating memories of Phuong, thinks of living in the countryside, working with his hands, though even that plantation, he thinks, will have been destroyed by the war.