The Sorrow of War

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From a psychological perspective, The Sorrow of War explores the ramifications of living with the consequences of war, the PTSD, survivor’s guilt and moral injury. Some families lost every son to the war; villages were depleted of their youth. Daughters were not spared on the battlefield or in love lost. Years of separation turned permanent when men never returned. Kien could never regain or replace the lost love of a childhood sweetheart. Both are too damaged by the war. The soldiers returned to the postwar hardships of life in Vietnam. The hopes of many were dashed by the devastation and the inability of their inner selves to reconcile with their current reality. The bitterness from the war did not stem from the cause. As a boy, Bảo Ninh’s family compared the arrival of the Americans with that of the French—another foreign presence in their country. As a fourteen-year-old boy, he was not so much intimidated by the American bombing of Hanoi as angered by it. His high school was moved outside of the city. It was a motivating factor in going to war at seventeen. Kien is a very human and relatable character in that he often contradicts himself. In this quote, he cannot believe the man at the airport wanted to murder the other man because he violated the corpse, but earlier in the war, he had wanted to shoot Hoa because she could not immediately find the right way to get to the path they needed. This highlights that war is messy and complicated, and a soldier cannot always predict how they will respond or what the right thing to do or think in a certain moment might be. His whole life from beginning, from childhood to the army, seemed detached and apart from him, floating in a void. Narrator, 16

Kien laments the fact that war means an altering of morality, an inversion of what being a good person is supposed to bring about. Oanh was good in that he let the woman he was supposed to kill go, but he was not rewarded for this; rather, he was killed for being "sympathetic." If a person in war wants to give in to their natural impulse of mercy, they may very well be rewarded for it with death. War suppresses all human sentiment of compassion and grace, rendering people automata. As a writer, Ninh captures the essence of the emptiness and loneliness of returning and the inability to reconstruct the joys of one’s past before the war. Far more is lost than the innocence of youth. And that second's hesitation was paid for with the life of the only other scout still alive in his unit. Narrator, 180 Kien isn't impressed by Communist Party leaders, either refusing to mention them at all or evincing his frustration that they want to send people off to die again in a war against Pol Pot. He saves his praise for quiet, ordinary men and women who sacrifice everything to fight. Most of them are peasants, and they will reap few rewards if they survive the war. Their needs and views weren't taken into account in the first place, Kien notes, and certainly, now that victory is secured, it isn't necessary to consult them. I do not mean to make this a discussion of the physical hardships of war. The internal damages last so much longer. It does lead to another observation. While the most profound aspects of The Sorrow of War delve into the psychological universals experienced in war, the Vietnamese troops were immersed in a flora familiar to them. They not only knew the culture and language of the villages, they knew the jungle.The discontent on his return was his inability to overcome the inner hollowness of his life. Unable to connect any of the threads to his prewar life, he was adrift in the realities of postwar Vietnam. The protagonist in The Sorrow of War, Kien, wanted something more. He faltered in his attempts. Another veteran speaks of their dilemma. 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. 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. The very characteristics of his spirit, his eccentricities, his free-flying artistic expressions and disregard for normal rules that annoyed others, were what attracted Phuong to him; she was a kindred soul. Narrator, 129

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ It was clearly those same friendly, simple peasant fighters who were the ones ready to bear the catastrophic consequences of this war, yet they never had a say in deciding the course of the war. Narrator, 18 My two brothers, my classmates, and my husband, too, were all younger than you, and joined up years later than you. But none of them has returned. From so many, there is only you left, Kien. Just you." Lan, 53