Summary
Kien constantly dreamed—of standing around Lofty Thinh’s grave, of his lost generation, of Hoa. His memories paraded before him ever since he returned to Hanoi. Sometimes he would be lost in a daydream right in the middle of the street. He heard helicopters in his bedroom, which then turned into a ceiling fan. When he watched an American war movie he felt like he had to start screaming and killing; it was “the thirst for killing, the cruelty, the animal psychology, the evil desperation” (47). The future was a lie, and the only hope was contained back in the past before the war. Kien wondered what the reward for it all was, for it seemed life was just as vulgar and cruel now as it was before.
He was now almost forty, an impossible age. He lost fourteen years to the war. As he wrote, things blurred together; his neat plan failed him. He wrote to rid of his devils, and he matured as he worked. Though he did not feel like he purged himself of emotions, he still wrote of everything in the most personal way. His writing was a challenge he must meet; the novel was a manifestation of some sacred duty he was put on earth to fulfill.
Five years after the war ended Kien went to Doi Mo, a small hamlet where, twenty years prior, his newly formed battalion did their training. Everything was gloomy now but he went to Mother Lanh’s house. She was a godmother to the recruits, and now the daughter Lan was there. Lan remembered Kien immediately, even his nickname “Sorrowful Spirit.” She bemoaned how no one else was left, how her mother heard of all her sons’ deaths on the same day, how her own baby died after two days. She told Kien she grew weaker every day, and even though she once thought of leaving, she could not do it. They were lovers for one night, and they sorrowfully bid each other goodbye. She told him he would always have a place here with her, and then told him to go, and she would never forget him.
A few years later Kien and his journalist colleagues passed the same way and Kien remembered the refuge Lan promised him with a tinge of regret and sadness.
After the war Kien let his relationships lapse. He was selfish, caring only for the passage of time and his work. He knew it was necessary to write of the war, but wondered why. He initially planned a postwar plot but “gradually the stories swirled back deep into the primitive jungles of war” (57). He once thought about writing about his father but only felt guilty. He knew little of his mother and knew he did not understand his father. He really only knew his mother’s second husband, a prewar poet who’d gone into hiding to escape the anti-intellectual atmosphere of Communism.
Kien visited his stepfather when he was seventeen and about to go away with the army. His mother was no longer alive. He saw how impoverished his stepfather was but how he dressed himself carefully. The man told Kien to be curious and inquire for himself, to embrace living, to come home to Hanoi, and to experience all of life. Kien thought these words wise, and he admired the man’s romantic, intellectual heart. He saw why his mother came to be with him.
Kien returned ten years later to find his stepfather but he’d died years before, and even the house was gone. Kien thought of this romantic man often. He wondered if his novel should be about his neighbors, like the old couple in love, or the retired sea captain, or Mr. Bao who came out of prison to live with his parents and was now devoutly religious with deep, sad eyes, or the barber who died at ninety-seven years old and was a beloved raconteur. Kien cared for this “whisper of ordinary life, not the thunder of war” (63).
Kien also remembered Hanh, who lived in the small room next to the stairs. She was a beautiful single girl whom the men lusted over and the girls hated. Kien was a teenager and was in love with Phuong. Hanoi was a noncombat area but was gearing up for war, and one day, Hanh asked him if he’d help her dig an air-raid shelter under her bed. He agreed and went over to her place. She made him dinner and gave him beer; he was a little uneasy, but he helped her nevertheless. They were both in the hole and Kien was overcome by a sensation he’d never felt before, almost overwhelmed by her smells and her closeness. He tried to kiss her but she wriggled away. He left and did not return even though she quietly told him to come back later because she had something to tell him. He avoided her from that day forward and one day she was gone. He always wondered what she wanted to tell him. It seemed like beautiful youth passed so quickly and was now just a memory.
One year in the seventies, a false spring came to Hanoi, but then winter returned with icy wind and drizzling rain. Phuong had left Kien. This hurt Kien deeply. He looked at himself in the mirror and could not believe his reflection. He had stopped his university studies and drank and smoked now. Phuong filled his dreams but mostly he dreamt of horrible, twisted things. He’d wake up shivering with fear, aching for Phuong.
One night that spring, Kien came upon two people struggling. A man was attacking a young woman, and Kien beat him off of her. He called a cab and took her home. He saw that she was one of the Hanoi “Green Coffee Girl” prostitutes. She was young, unhealthy-looking, shivering, and starving. They shared a cigarette and she fell asleep. In the morning she recognized him as the friend of her big brother Vinh.
Kien had taken Vinh’s possessions home to Vinh’s family after the young man was killed. It was a poor, dirty hamlet but Vinh’s mother was thankful. Kien did not remember the sister’s name but they talked of the past. She offered herself to him but he declined. As she prepared to leave he gave her some money and lottery tickets. She told him people would think poorly of him for being with her but she was grateful for him. After she left Kien felt vulgar and impotent.
After the war, Kien did not know what to do—business? School? The city was alive again and Kien’s friends encouraged him to rejoin the army to go up against Pol Pot’s Chinese allies. Kien heard people in the street talking about how it felt like old times, familiar times, but he knew the Vietnamese did not love war; they would fight because they were courageous. Kien did not get involved in this new conflict, though. It was at this time that he felt alive again, and began writing the novel.
When Kien came home, he found Tran Sinh, a former classmate of his and Phung’s. It was Sinh’s time to die. He had a terrible spinal wound and had deteriorated quickly, becoming a stinking corpse of a man. Kien visited him and was struck by the sight. They were in two different situations now, separated by a huge gulf. Kien could not bear it and sobbed as he ran out. He did not know what to do.
Initially, Kien had been thrilled to return to Hanoi. He had traveled for three days on the trans-Vietnam “unification” troop train after Saigon fell. Soldiers were packed in, demoralized and bitter. No one in the general population seemed to care about them, and neither did the authorities. On the train, Kien befriended Hien, a girl soldier. She was wounded but strong, and the two embraced feverishly.
When Kien reached home, he had an odd feeling as he came to his old house in the dark of night. When he saw the doors emblazoned with his and his father’s name, he was filled with joy. But then a door opened and Kien saw Phuong. They kissed but he began to feel uneasy. He then realized she had not been alone in her room, and he realized his faith in the future was a waste. Phuong had lived with a man but made him leave when Kien returned. His new life with her was broken, impossible. It ended for the first time when he beat up the man. Phuong told Kien they were doomed, that she was a dark memory for him, that their time was over. Kien was disconsolate but knew she was right and that she could not return.
In his room that winter, men from his platoon returned to him in his mind; “the air in his room felt strange, vibrating with images of the past” (86). He mechanically began to write as if filled with divine inspiration. He brought back cruel images of his dying comrades. He heard the shells and the screaming. The next morning when he woke he felt curious, as after the first time he was wounded. He wandered around Hanoi that Sunday, feeling reborn. He sat in the park, smelling the spring, watching the sky and the lake. Memories flooded him—memories of rivers, deserted villages, women. That afternoon he let his soul “take off on its flight to his eternal past” (88).
Analysis
Bao Ninh isn’t the first writer to write about PTSD and the fact that a soldier is forever changed by war, but he does write about it in almost a uniquely brutal, unsparing, intimate, and compelling fashion. No reader can come away from The Sorrow of War thinking Kien is as he was before he joined the NVA, nor can they easily justify that he moves back into civilian life with any sort of ease or felicity. The writer Pham Xuan Nguyen summed up what Ninh was trying to do by stating, “For Vietnamese soldiers, when you returned, there were two things that caused them trauma. First was the question of why they were still alive when their comrades had died. Second, is life in peacetime better than death in the war?”
For Kien, the answer to the second question is an emphatic “no.” The reality of coming home isn’t just encapsulated in the disconcerting moment that he realizes Phuong has taken another lover (many, in fact) since he was away and that their romance cannot continue as it was before the war began. Coming home is also the unrelenting barrage of memories, the sense that civilians do not understand what a veteran experienced and that he or she is, therefore, essentially alone: Kien says, “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” (46). At night, a ceiling fan becomes a helicopter, and Kien “[curls] up in defense against the expected vapor-streak and the howling of their rockets” (46). Watching an American Vietnam War movie leads to Kien yelling, his heart beating rapidly, and his feeling the overwhelming desire to “jump in and mix it in the fiery scene of blood, mad killing, and brutality that warps soul and personality” (47). At night, he would dream “of crazy, twisted things, distorted apparitions of loneliness and sorrow. Horrible, poisonous nightmares brought back images that haunted him constantly throughout the war” (70).
Kien does not have the relationships nor bulwarks of stability he once had, for “from my life before soldiering there remains sadly little” (47). Life is as “vulgar and cruel” (47) now as it was during war itself. There is no beautiful future, “no new life, no new era” (47). It was clear to him as soon as he got home that “the general population just didn’t care about [the soldiers]. Nor did their own authorities” (79). No celebrations greeted them when they came home, only “an endless stream of the most ironic of teachings, urging [the soldiers] to ignore the spirit of reconciliation” (80). Kien is disillusioned by everything he sees. He stops going to school and begins drinking and smoking too much. He sees how the “politicians, middle-aged men with fat bellies and short legs” (75) are trying to ramp up another war against Pol Pot—a “synthetically generated frenzy of patriotism” (74) that irritates him in its crassness.
The only thing that provides Kien solace is writing, something he realizes he does “only to rid himself of his devils” (49). The novel is “his last adventure as a soldier,” and he has only himself with whom to do this task. He writes because “at the bottom of his heart he believes he exists on this earth to perform some unnamed heavenly duty. A task that is sacred and noble, but secret” (51), and everything has been leading up to “fulfilling the sacred, heavenly duty of which the novel would become the earthly manifestation” (51). He writes “almost mechanically…with a sense of divine inspiration” (86). Critic Christopher Coker calls Kien’s writing “his personal act of atonement,” a “separate peace,” and “his spiritual act of defiance against an unforgiving regime for the spirits of those killed in the war still remain within him.”
Indeed, Kien found he could not write about the prewar period, nor about the postwar present: he was forced to relive his memories of war, “cruelly reviving the images of his comrades, of the mortal combat in the jungle that became the Screaming Souls” (86). These ghosts are, Coker notes, “a projection of Kien’s survival guilt” and by writing them into the novel he “can complete his own ritual exorcism.”
