The Sorrow of War

Back in January 2008, I read the book The Sorrow of War by author Bao Ninh. A few days earlier, while browsing a bookstore, I was drawn to the cover photo and thought it was "just another novel," with my inner voice telling me to "pass on it." Immediately, though, I felt compelled to read the author’s name and guessed he was Vietnamese; I didn't know for sure, but he certainly looked like it based on his name, and indeed he was. So I picked it up, held it, looked at it, and bought it. I think it was the cover design, combined with the author's name, that led me to buy it—plus it wasn't very expensive, between ten and fifteen pesos, though I can't recall the exact amount now. I had always wanted to read something about the Vietnam War, but not post-war studies or fiction written by a foreign author. This was the novel I was looking for: it was written "from the inside." Whoever wrote it knew better than anyone what the war was truly like.

I am going to transcribe what the inside flap of the cover says: Bao Ninh was born in Hanoi in 1952. During the Vietnam War, he served in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred members who went to war in 1969, he was one of only 10 survivors. The Sorrow of War, his first novel, has been a resounding bestseller in Vietnam. Winner of various literary awards, such as The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Bao Ninh was unable to obtain a visa to leave his country to receive them until four years after it was published.

It is perhaps, if not, the saddest book I have read so far. As its title suggests, a painful novel. Even the few moments the character describes as "happy" are surrounded by the worst possible scenarios. It has death, deaths, and more deaths, rapes, the wounded, the maimed, the disabled, broken families, explosions, infighting, prostitution, assaults, loneliness, emptiness, sadness—everything you find in a war. It tells the story of a young man who enlists in the army at age 17 in the face of imminent war. He spends 11 years of war fighting with the regular army. As soon as he joins, he receives three months of training and is posted to the south. It is helpful to read some extra information on how the war developed, the situation—mostly the historical context, which can be found in any encyclopedia—because it helps those who know nothing about it orient themselves in time and space. The character was in Hanoi, and they send him to fight in the south of the country. He sets off with his battalion, but as the introduction says, everyone dies—or at least the majority, leaving only ten survivors. I won't spoil how he survives or how the plot unfolds, since that is in the novel.

It is a short novel, 220 pages long. It reads quickly. It has the peculiarity of not being divided into chapters; when the author wants to separate something, he leaves a space. But it is also written in a unique style: it constantly jumps back and forth in time, mixed up according to how he remembered the episodes at the moment of writing, as the author himself relates.
To sell the book, on the front and back covers, they included newspaper reviews. An opinion should come from the reader themselves, which is something I didn't like about the edition. Perhaps those newspapers somehow funded the Spanish translation—I don't know, just my own conjectures—although I did like the novel itself.

The novel has some absences that caught my attention, mostly because of the idea I had about the war—an idea perhaps unfounded, based on movies one sees, generally American movies about the war. That is, the author does not talk about the tunnels during the war, nor does he mention the Vietnamese guerrilla, known as the Vietcong. But I intuit that this is due to the position the character held within the regular Vietnamese army.

The language is plain, that of a young man who had chosen not to go to university in order to enlist in the military. Apart from being a possible critique of countries that use minors and kids in wars—in this case, the young man was 17, but the sad situation in Africa with its internal conflicts and the current use of child soldiers is well known—I mentioned the language because on several occasions it reveals references to the combatants' beliefs. It mentions many ghost stories, vulgar and/or popular beliefs about ghosts without rational foundation, as the author himself states.
 

Something else I wanted to write down about the book caught my attention: it belongs to the publishing house Ediciones B, and at the end of the back cover it says Ediciones B donates 0.7% of the profits from the sale of this copy to Amnesty International.

To conclude, I will copy a few excerpts:

There, the dogtooth grass grows near the banks of the streams, within reach of the mountain carp, which nibble at its roots, making it exquisite when caught, though with narcotic effects. The locals claim that dogtooth grass thrives in graveyards or anywhere the smell of death lingers. It is a flower that loves blood. Its scent is so sweet it is hard to believe. (Page 15)

However, only a few of its heroes would live from the first scenes to the final pages, for he saw them, and subsequently described them, trapped in ferocious firefights, in combats so horrible that everyone who had to take part in them prays to heaven never to experience such terror again. Combats where death stalked them, pursued them, and laid ambushes for them. Where a thin line separated death from survival: they were killed one by one, or all at once; they died on the spot, or were wounded and bled out in terrible agony; or they might live, but suffering the nightmares of white explosions that tore their souls apart and stripped them of their personality. (Page 87)

Kien and the rest of the MIA team had no need for an oath. They had emerged from the war imbued with respect and mourning for the unfortunate dead, named or nameless. (Page 89)
Kien burst out laughing. Naturally, Phuong was right. She jumped on, and he sat down and began to pedal. It was dangerous, as they were the only ones on those deserted streets and ran the risk of being arrested by the guards. However, as they approached the station, the air-raid siren sounded indicating the end of the bombing, causing them to burst into euphoric laughter. Speeding down the last deserted streets toward the station, passing empty shops that echoed their laughter, and catching a train heading off to war... it was sensational! (Page 156)