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.
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.
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.
After considerable exposition from Kien, Bao Ninh introduces himself to the reader, explaining that he has been working with Kien, “the writer,” to finish the novel; although Kien is departed now, Bao explains, Kien's decision to finally look into his own fractured past yielded a reward for Kien in the final days of his life: he remembered the way things used to feel when they were all naive and innocent, before the war.
