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The Sorrow of War
By BAO NINH
Kelvin Ha
Rating: **** out of *****.
Published by: Minerva, 1994.
Because of the media bias with regard to the Vietnam conflict, readers and movie goers world wide know about how the American's suffered in Vietnam and about how it's war veterans have trouble adjusting to life back home in the US. But the American's lost less than a million men in that war and their social institutions and infrastructure survived relatively the war relatively intact. The Vietnamese lost two million men, and their culture, society, landscape, and traditions were literally obliterated by the conflict. Yet their side of the story has seldom been told. Worse still, they have always been portrayed in the media as faceless "gooks", "Charlie", or "VC". Up until a few years ago, it would have appeared that the Vietnamese participants in the conflict were people without an identity. Even in Oliver Stone's Heaven and Earth, the American's were cast as the good guys and the Vietnamese had no identity at all except in relation to the yanks. But with the publication of Duong Thu Huong's Blind Paradise in Dutch in 1994, the Vietnamese finally found a voice. This was quickly followed by Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War. THE SADDEST STORY EVER TOLD
The ostensible concern in war novels may be war, but underneath all the blood and carnage there always lies some far deeper human or social issue. War novels like Erich Remarque's All Quiet On the Western Front, Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls, and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, all deal with far larger issues than war and fighting. They deal, in a larger sense, with the makeup and morality of a culture or society which is revealed during the upheavals of fighting. In the end, war novels always deal with some personal struggle through both a public and personal hell and usually end with some sort of redemption for the protagonist, even if it is death.
Bao Ninh's first novel is no exception. Born in 1952, he served in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade during the Vietnam war. Out of the five hundred youths who went to war with the brigade in 1969, Bao Ninh was only one out of it's ten survivors. It is therefore no coincidence that war should be the subject of his first work it was a seminal experience which influenced his whole life.
Semi-autobiographical in nature, the novel's protagonist, Kien, is a lone survivor of his brigade and a ten year veteran of the war. When the book opens, he is part of an MIA body collection team. It is through his memories of the last ten years that we see how the war has wasted his youth and that of his countrymen. Merging his memories of the past with images of the present onto paper, Kien writes in order to exorcise his demons of the war and to try to cope with the hopeless present which he had sacrificed his youth fighting for. To Kien, writing is the only way he can perform his last duty as a soldier, which is "to expose the realities of war and to tear aside conventional images."
But beneath all his anguished memories and images of death and destruction, there lies a bitter sweet love story about him and his childhood sweetheart who were parted by the fortunes of war. It is this love story, so ironically destroyed by war, that makes this novel the saddest story this reviewer has ever read. No where has there ever been a more pitiful tale of unnecessary loss and suffering as in this book. But what makes this book really sad is that all the loss and suffering endured at all levels of Vietnamese life-- from the loss of youth, family, life, tradition, and love-- is all in vain. The future that Kien had fought for as a youth never materialises, and in the mean time, he has lost all that was ever meaningful to him. This is the real sorrow of war, and it is a sorrow that is shared by all alike, whether victor or foe (not the Americans, but the south Vietnamese). This is a highly recommended book not just for anyone interested in the human story of war, but for anyone who wants to know about the Vietnam conflict from another point of view besides that of the whining Americans^Ò.
Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War is available at MPH Bookstores at $15.35.
Kelvin Ha is a drama instructor who wishes he could smack the daylights out of today's spoilt kids whom he meets on a day to day basis. To this day, he has never raised a hand in anger. Yet.
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