The Sorrow Of War: Reader's Response

The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bao Ninh is a immensely descriptive novel of a Soldier's struggles after spending ten years serving his country during the Vietnam War. The story starts very slowly, with main character Kien in a "Missing in Action Remains-Gathering Team"(3). I was pretty bored for about the first thirty pages of the novel, as his team, consisting of only him and one other person, driving around collecting the long-dead remains of the dead soldiers after the war. Kien starts hallucinating and thinks he sees and hears "Screaming Souls"(7). Scattered in the forest and remaining in the bodies he collects. He sleeps in the back of the truck, in a hammock above the dead bodies. It's no surprise why he gets frequent nightmares, why would he want to sleep above all those bodies? The next thirty to fifty pages detail his hallucinations and bring him to the home of an old acquaintance, who although dead, has a daughter named Lan that vividly remembers him, and the two reminisce on the horrors of the war. Lan wants Kien to stay with her and live out his days, but he knows he must finish this job so he can go back to his hometown.

Finally, on page 56 the true plot line of the story shines through. "When starting this novel, the first in his life, he planned a postwar plot...but relentlessly, his pen disobeyed him. Each page revived one story of death after another and gradually the stories swirled back deep into the primitive jungles of war" (57). This entire book is about the struggle for Kien to write his novel, and how he struggles so painfully with Post-Traumatic Stress. Throughout his book he deals with both the sorrows of war and the sorrows of love.

In his sections detailing the sorrow of war, Ninh's writing resembles Tim O'Brien in that the stories pull you in and make you believe they are real, when there in reality may be little or no truth to the story. As Kien recalls his painful memories of war, they take shape on his random writings. "The sorrows of war and his nostalgia drove him down into the depths of his imagination. From there his writing could take substance" (173). For Kien to be able to write about his experiences, he had to get drunk and write only at night. This is so strange, how is it that he can only write while in an intoxicated tired state of mind? My guess is that it has to do with his conditions in war and being drunk and alone in the dark was the closest post-war way to relive his experiences. "What remained was sorrow, the immense sorrow, the sorrow of having survived. The sorrow of war" (192). As he writes his stories I couldn't help but feel sorry for him; he struggles so much but there is no one there to help him.

As a child, Kien had a lover whom he spent most of his time with. Her name is Phuong, and she is a beautiful young girl. But as the story progresses and Kien must go to war, they realize that their "eternal love" was anything but that. When he returns from the war he finds that his love is sleeping around with other people to fulfill her material needs. She tells Kien that times have changed, and they were never meant for each other. I think this is so sad because they seemed like the perfect couple as children and now, because of what war has done to them, they will never be happy together. Their last conversation before Phuong leaves for good shows how much passion they had had for each other, "'Are you in love?' he said. 'I loved you and only you, Kien. I never loved anyone else. And you?' she asked. 'I still love you,' he replied" (146). This really got me attached to the two lovers who were once so close to each other. Because of what war does to a soldier's heart, "The sorrow of war inside a soldier's heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love....It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past" (94). If only their love hadn't ended so tragically they could have lived out a happy life together and started a family.

At the end of Sorrow of War Bao Ninh states that he had received all of the manuscripts of Kien's writings from his mute neighbor one day. This really shocked me because the whole time I thought that Kien's stories of war and his struggles with his novel were actually Ninh's struggles, only told in third person so, as Tim O'Brien would put it, "To objectify himself to the experience." I really enjoyed reading this novel. At first it was hard to read with overly long descriptions of the screaming souls and the ghosts Kien saw, but as the story developed and I grew attached to the character of Kien, I really started to enjoy the novel. It was very sad how far Kien had fallen in his life from where he was, and all of the vivid details helped me visualize what it was like for Kien to have to serve in the Vietnam war. This book opened up my eyes to a new perspective of the war; the men I used to consider to be the "bad guys" suffered equally as much if not more than any American "hero" fighting in the same battle.