The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam Book

The Future Lied To Us

A reminiscence, rather than a memoir, tumbling between the time before war, eleven years of brutal fighting, and then its aftermath. Shifting from first to third person, with the occasional second person letter, the story is as unstructured as the lives involved. And none of it is politically correct: "No. The ones who loved war were not the young men, but the others like the politicians, middle-aged men with fat bellies and short legs. Not the ordinary people. The recent years of war had brought enough suffering and pain to last them a thousand years."

At its simplest, this story is the universal one of the common soldier: an inexperienced young man dislocated from a normal life, and exposed to the horror of having to kill and watching others killed, seemingly endlessly. Inevitably he loses not only his civilized existence but his identity. Using drugs when he can find them and pure grit when he can't, he manages to survive. But for what? His peace is as a worn out alcoholic, all his family, friends, and comrades dead. Unable to sustain any sort of intimate relationship, all he can do is remember. "This kind of peace? In this kind of peace it seems people have unmasked themselves and revealed their true, horrible selves. So much blood, so many lives were sacrificed for what?" His memory, particularly his memory of his own expectations, is the source of his malaise.

He writes as a form of therapy, to rid himself of the devils, his memories, that now constitute his personality. All he has is these devils, these ghosts, who appear in flashbacks, spontaneous violence, recurrent dreams of disaster and a depressive lethargy. Only by writing about them can he exorcise their power. He has been told by others who have been in his position, "After this hard-won victory fighters like you, Kien, will never be normal again. You won't even speak with your normal voice, in the normal way again."

So his challenge is to find a new voice, actually an entirely new personality represented by such a voice. Some voice other than "The way you speak in hell." Incrementally he is able to find himself without forgetting what he has seen: "The tragedies of the war years have bequeathed to my soul the spiritual strength that allows me to escape the infinite present. The little trust and will to live that remains stems not from my illusions but from the power of my recall." He realises that there is something within him waiting to be made visible: "There is a force at work in him that he cannot resist, as though it opposes every orthodox attitude taught him and it is now his task to expose the realities of war and to tear aside conventional images."

This force reveals hard truths known to every common soldier in every war of history: "What remained was sorrow, the immense sorrow, the sorrow of having survived. The sorrow of war." The only real result is sorrow, "Justice may have won, but cruelty, death and inhuman violence had also won... Losses can be made good, damage can be repaired and wounds will heal in time. But the psychological scars of the war will remain forever."

And yet despite the unequal balance of cost and benefit, there is something else, a "spiritual beauty in the horrors of conflict," without which "the war would have been another brutal, sadistic exercise." Throughout his story Bao Ninh weaves a sort of lyrical spirituality which would be an obscenity if written by anyone who hadn't been through the grinding mill of virtually the entire American War in Vietnam. "He saw his life as a river with himself standing unsteadily at the peak of a tall hill, silently watching his life ebb from him, saying farewell to himself. The flow of his life focused and refocused and each moment of that stream was recalled, each event, each memory was a drop of water in his nameless, ageless river."

Eventually he emerges from the nihilism of his despair in the reading of his manuscript by another who, through it, feels he knows the author: "His spirit had not been eroded by a cloudy memory. He could feel happy that his soul would find solace in the fountain of sentiments from his youth. He returned time and time again to his love, his friendship, his comradeship, those human bonds which had all helped us overcome the thousand sufferings of the war."

Memory had become more than sorrow; it also carried the joy of his youth - for the reader of his life if not for him. The future had lied but it did not destroy the past - for the reader who is in the present. Could it be that the only way that any life makes sense is after it's over - and interpreted by someone else?