Summary
The Missing-In-Action Remains-Gathering Team waited for the dry season in Vietnam. The jungle was soaked; it rained nearly every night and the ground was muddy, making it impossible to travel. The truck lumbered through but made slow progress. They were almost to the Jungle of Screaming Souls, a place Kien knew well. He was there with the 27th Battalion, where the sun was burning hot, the fighting was barbarous, and men were blown to bits or went mad. Kien’s commander screamed it was better to die than to surrender and shot himself in the head. After the Americans withdrew, the rainy season came and bloated corpses languished in the watery mud.
After that terrible battle, this place became known as the Jungle of Screaming Souls, a name that gave everyone the chills. There were horribly colored bamboo shoots, massive fireflies, and dark, moaning plants and trees. It was not a place for the timid. Kien and his squad scout set up an altar to honor and pray for the souls when they were sent back there in 1974.
There was a place called Leprosy Village near where the truck was right now. It was empty, but Kien remembered how, one day, “Lofty” Thinh went inside and shot an orangutan which, when it was skinned, looked like a woman. Everyone was horrified and ran away. Lofty Thinh was soon killed, followed by the entire platoon—except for Kien.
This area had also been used to house front-line soldiers called back for political indoctrination, but the scouts were treated relatively well and had a good amount of time for relaxing. Kien developed a passion for cards there. There was no fighting at this point, so they were all safe. Lofty Thinh was still alive, Can hadn’t deserted, and Kien’s other friends were alive.
The platoon got down to four soldiers, though, and they were playing a card game as the barrage began the campaign against Saigon. Kien did not want to rush the game because to do so would be bad luck, but the others did not care. Van was later burned alive in a T54 tank. Tu was killed three hours before the war ended.
Kien was in his hammock thinking of these soldiers, wondering whose soul was calling from the deep jungle. It all looked the same to him; a year was not a long time, but the war was the difference.
Kien’s mind turned back to when the soldiers first stayed here in August. There was a strong perfume that filled their sleep and fueled strange dreams, which, they learned, came from the canina flower. It was a blood-loving flower that thrived near graveyards. The soldiers began to smoke the flower and escape the hell of the soldier’s life, the fear of death, and the fear of tomorrow. Kien would think about Hanoi when he was high. All the soldiers related their dreams of different things such as women, food, or going home. Sometimes, they would imagine monstrous things, and these rumors and predictions “were seen as warnings of an approaching calamity, horrible and bloody” (14), so some men began setting up little altars.
During this time, war seemed endless; victory followed withdrawal, and vice versa. In that year of 1974, the NVA attacked Kontum township, and the men in the Screaming Souls Jungle hoped they would not be sent in as backup.
Kien remembered sitting by the stream with a blank mind, something he did every day for hours. It was a sad, rainy autumn, and the men suffered from hunger, malaria, and weakness. Kien tried to remember the better times, but he could not; his whole life seemed away from him in a void.
One day, Kien had mocked death by walking right into the ARVN line. He was oblivious to fire, shot a soldier at close range, and was indifferent, lethargic, and depressed. The enemy dispersed, but Kien was not proud. This did lead him to be selected for training at the Infantry Institute of Hanoi, meaning he’d be sent back north. Kien was not pleased as he might have been years ago because he just wanted to die quietly like an ant or an insect. He wanted to die with regular troops, with “friendly, simple pleasant fighters who were the ones ready to bear the catastrophic consequences of [the] war” (18).
As Kien sat by the stream and thought about going north, Can, a thin boy and chief of Squad 2, came up to him. Kien did not want to talk and to hear Can’s problems. Can started congratulating him for going north and expressed his jealousy. He went on about how he tried to follow all the rules and was not afraid of dying but was not being promoted. Before war, he had wanted to go to seminary but ended up here. He could not understand why he was not home with his suffering mother. At one point he broke into tears and Kien frowned, annoyed, asking if he was going to desert. Can assented and said he knew Kien would understand. Kien sighed and told him he’d be caught and shot. He also said it was suicidal and shameful, which made Can say that he’d never seen anything honorable in this war. Can left Kien, the latter’s back turned. Kien turned around and Can was gone. He called his name and then burst into tears.
Afterward, the commanding officers called for Can to be traced, fearing he would betray the secrets and plans of the regiment. They found him a few days later only a couple of hours away from the hills. He was only a rotting corpse. No one spoke of him again. Kien could not believe how a man vanished completely, but Can’s image stayed in his own brain, and he would offer a prayer for his soul.
Kien was now with the MIA team, which had the task of gathering the remains of the dead from the worst battlefields. All the soldiers fallen there were just remains, sharing one destiny regardless of what they’d done or who they were. All the souls flying upwards brought Kien back into the war.
It seemed like this was a mystical night and Can’s soul was whispering to him. In the middle of the night, he heard a terrible, sorrowful screech on the cliffs like an echo. Kien knew it was love’s lament, not the mountain ghosts.
This sound was familiar to Kien because in the past his B3 scout platoon “had lived a moment of love which was strange and fascinating, fueled by a passion both wanton and unique, born of a magical meeting” (26). His unit built huts at the base of the mountain. After a couple of nights, it seemed clear that something odd was going on. Kien heard a girl’s laugh one night, and then saw a young woman’s reflection in the stream. He asked Lofty Thinh if he saw someone but Lofty said no. Kien felt a sense of self-pity and impending doom, and he wondered if he’d seen a ghost or girl.
He began to sense midnight movements among the men and worried about the welfare of the shadows. He came to realize that there was an abandoned farmhouse in the area and there were three young girls who once lived there and must have returned now that they were teens. He knew the men were sleeping with these girls and he could not bring himself to discipline them. This made Kien think of his own love back in Hanoi.
In later years this was odd to him, for this was a time when he was whole, before war had warped him. War ultimately had no romance, only ruin. Kien closed his eyes and thinks of how all those boys and girls were dead, and how the small acts of love did indeed foreshadow something terrible.
The girls suddenly went missing, and Kien went along with the search. Thinh called their names and no one replied. They went into the house, which was lovely, and all seemed in perfect order. It seemed as if the girls had been called away, and the silence was unnerving. The men went over to the stream where there was a tiny bathhouse built over the water. When Kien walked over to it, he saw the door had been ripped off its hinges. A white bra was on the rocks.
The men began to howl and said the commandos must have done it. Kien asked how they knew it was commandos, and Thinh said they found a Rubi cigarette-end and footsteps. They had begun to feel anxious which is why they came back here.
The men traced the commandos to a hiding place and ambushed them. They killed three and captured the remaining four. Lofty Thinh was killed by a bullet through his heart. The exhausted and dirty commandos remained silent as they were questioned. Finally, one laughed and said the girls were sacrificed to the Water Spirit. Kien asked them why, if they were tracking the regular army, they felt they had to kill three young girls so brutally. When the men did not answer, he ordered them to dig their own graves.
The youngest boy apologized to Kien for the rudeness of his leader and begged him not to kill him. He said he did not rape the girls or stab them, and that he was a Catholic. He begged for pity and showed Kien a picture of his own love.
Kien told the young man to go stand with the others. They all seemed fearless in the face of imminent death. Kien grew angry and fired over their heads. The boy fell to the ground, writhing pitifully. Kien hit him with the gun to get back in line. The boy begged to fill in the graves and give him all the information he wanted. Cu, one of Kien’s men, trembled and asked Kien if they could just leave them alive and send them to their superiors. Kien burned with anger and shoved his gun in Cu’s mouth, asking if he wanted to die with them.
In his MIA days, Tran Son, the truck driver, woke Kien up. Kien was deeply exhausted, having had some of his worst nightmares. The driver understood and said that every night, he spoke with the dead who came from their graves to speak with him. Some were old friends. There were no words or sounds, but it was communication. They understood each other but could not do anything for each other.
The driver said peace only thrived “on the blood and bones of fallen comrades” (42) and that the ones in Screaming Souls were the most honorable. Kien wondered about this, saying there were honorable people not yet born, and survivors trying to live a good life; what would be the point of fighting? The driver conceded a bit, but he said he did not know if the next generation would even get to grow up. This peace did not even seem worth it, and life was still terrible. Their era was done.
Kien wondered at how gloomy Tran Son was. He looked out the window as they drove on. It suddenly felt like something was watching him. He wondered if he would see the conclusion of the scene from his mind earlier. Kien asked Son about what he would do after this. Son replied that he would finish school and be a singer with his guitar and sing songs that reminded people of the war.
Kien thought it might be better to forget it all, but he knew it was hard to forget. He would always live “somewhere between a dream world and reality, on the knife-edge between the two” (44). Yes, there was a new era for Vietnam and himself and he must survive. But his soul was still in turmoil, and the past suffocated him and his memories were too close, always ready to be randomly provoked “in these days which are little more but a succession of boring, predictable, stultifying weeks” (44).
Analysis
As the novel opens, Bao Ninh throws his readers pell-mell into the fray: there is no exposition, no gentle segueing from peacetime to wartime. Within pages, there are violent deaths, eerie ghosts, haunting memories, and embittered survivors. What is also clear is the chronology of the novel is not linear; indeed, readers will soon see that the opening of the novel in 1976 is not when it “starts,” and that Ninh takes us through Kien’s journey all the way until he is about forty, a couple of decades after the war’s end. As critic Christopher Coker writes, the characters in The Sorrow of War and other Vietnam War novels “are defeated as much by the times as by the violence.”
There are two main themes that manifest themselves early on and continue throughout the duration of the novel: the conditions of war, and the fact that the long-hoped-for peace leaves much to be desired. In regard to the first, Bao Ninh is justifiably celebrated for stripping away almost all of the ideology and heroic mythology of fighting in the Vietnam War (the main reason why the novel was not published in Vietnam for ten years after it came out in English). To begin, the weather is unpredictable, with relentless rain, humidity, and their concomitant mud. Traveling is nearly impossible and “bloated human corpses…[are] all drifting in a stinking marsh” (5). Kien feels “snakes and centipedes [crawling] over him” (6). Soldiers embraced drugs such as the canina flower to “forget the daily hell of the soldier’s life” (12). There is, especially when it rains, “sadness, monotony, and starvation” (15). Soldiers contract malaria and “became anemic and their bodies broke out in ulcers, showing through worn and torn clothing. They looked like lepers, not heroic forward scouts. Their faces looked moss-grown, hatched and sorrowful, without hope. It was a stinking life” (16). There was the sense that “the path of war seemed endless, desperate, and leading nowhere” (15). The capacity to love, to feel, and to be normal was stripped away from those who were in it; Kien laments “that he could never again share the frivolities and elations of ordinary love” (31) and that his memories would forever be with him, “easily provoked at random moments” (44).
As for the fighting itself, conditions were unimaginable. For example, Kien observes they were relentlessly attacked by the Americans and the ARVN, sometimes “blown out of their shelters again as they went mad, became disoriented, and threw themselves into nets of bullets, dying in the flaming inferno” (5). Men became inured to what they saw and what they did. Kien saw himself as “coldly indifferent, showing no fear, no anger. Just lethargy and depression” (17) even as he killed.
The soldiers in The Sorrow of War do not see a firm line between life and death, and the souls of those killed in the war often return to haunt the survivors. In the Jungle of the Screaming Souls, “the sobbing whispers were heard deep in the jungle at night, the howls carried on the wind. Perhaps they really were the voices of the wandering souls of dead soldiers” (6). Even the plants and trees join in the sepulchral chorus, and “when the ghostly music begins it unhinges the soul and the entire wood looks the same no matter where you are standing” (6). Many men, including Kien, set up altars for their comrades who fell. Tran Son, the MIA truck driver, tells Kien, “Not a night goes by without them waking me up to have a talk. It terrifies me. All kinds of ghosts, new soldiers, old soldiers…” (41).
Tran Son also expresses to Kien how he feels about peace, which is, bluntly, that it is a farce. He states vociferously that “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?” (42). It is a “chaotic postwar situation in the cities, with their black markets. Life is so frustrating for all of us” (42). Coker writes that “Kien’s generation soon lost their faith but not their courage” for “neither he nor his friends find any personal redemption through their personal experiences.”
