Mekong Delta, Vietnam (1969)
I have read some literature written by my former enemies. At the top of my personal list of favorites is Bảo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War.
A great war novel taps into the universal tragedy that runs deeper than any biased account of heroics on one side versus evil soldiers on the other. At the heart of war is a haunting ache that festers long after the acts of brutality necessary for survival cease. War taints the soul. It goes deeper than the “kill or be killed” rationale that many believe absolves participants of blame. It is not that simple. No matter the circumstances, killing another human being is a fundamental taboo for most of us. No amount of military training removes that. The aftermath requires a reckoning with our humanity.
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.
“What remained was sorrow, the immense sorrow, the sorrow of having survived. The sorrow of war.”
Ninh’s personal experiences were prolonged and extreme. Dispatched to the war in 1969 as a soldier, one of 500 in the “Glorious 27th Youth Brigade,” only ten returned. His battles included a final one on the last day of the war, April 30, 1975, at Tân Sơn Nhất Airfield near Saigon.
There was initial joy that the war was over, then a reckoning with the depth of his generation’s sacrifices. On the “peace train” returning from the south to Hanoi with other soldiers, they were searched for contraband by the authorities. There was grumbling amongst themselves over disrespect to their sacrifices. All had buried many friends throughout 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.
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.
“I’m simply a soldier like you who’ll now have to live with broken dreams and with pain. But, my friend, our era is finished. After this hard-won victory fighters like you, Kien, will never be normal again. You won’t even speak in your normal voice, in the normal way again.”
Victory was meaningless without reconciling the sorrow of war with Kien’s life going forward. The memories would not allow it as they dominated his conscious mind and took over the imagery of his dreams.
“In later years Kien experienced…long periods of withdrawal. Like the dead, one felt no fear, no enthusiasm, no joy, no sadness, no feelings for anything. No concerns and no hopes. One was totally devoid of feeling, and had no regard for the clever or the stupid, the brave or the cowardly, commanders or privates, friend or foe, life or death, happiness or sadness. It was all the same; it amounted to nothing.”
Throughout the novel, Kien reflects on the irrevocable emotional costs of going to war. A deep chasm separated his life before and after the war. Bao Ninh’s character expressed this from many nuanced perspectives, a lyrical yet haunting accounting of the emotional residue left by participating in the killing.
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Bảo Ninh appeared in the Ken Burns’ ten-part series on the Vietnam War. A brief segment had him taking Tim O’Brien to task for being so much better fed during the war. There is a hierarchy in war, of sorts, measured by the suffering endured. Grunts resent those in the rear where it is not only safer, but living conditions are superior. The food is better, and a bunk is available to sleep on in a barracks instead of a foxhole.
I would bet Tim O’Brien didn’t consider his C-rations outstanding, but grunts had a lot of discomforts to worry about before they even got to the combat. Protein starved, and sometimes without enough rations, it must have been excruciating for the NVA.
In Poisoned Jungle, the main character Andy Parks, with whom I share some DNA, lost thirty pounds during his tour. I personally lost forty. I didn’t use that figure because I thought it might be perceived as an exaggeration. Food fantasies were rampant amongst the American troops in Vietnam. I found it interesting that food would be mentioned by Ninh when referring to O'Brien, who many feel is the best American writer to come out of the war.
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.
There was a scene early in the novel where their NVA company was holed up during the rainy season. Some of the men discovered a mildly intoxicating plant growing in abundance in the area, rosa canina. They made tea out of it and included it with their tobacco. It provided a mild high that helped with the boredom and loneliness. When the political commissar discovered its widespread usage, he ordered the men to scour the jungle and eradicate the plants by pulling them out by the roots. The authoritarian approach is so “military-like,” something the soldiers of most armies of the world would recognize.
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.
I never succumbed to the fabrication of some Americans that “life didn’t mean as much to the Vietnamese.” I treated too many civilian war casualties not to see their agony. The Sorrow of War gives a glimpse into the soul of a North Vietnamese soldier. It is not so different from my own.