Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Sorrow of War, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, Trauma, and Moving On
Love in Times of Hardship
Coping Through Writing
Patriotism, Sacrifice, and Skepticism
Summary
Analysis
Kien thinks back to April 30, 1975—otherwise known as Victory Day. That was the day Northern forces captured the airport in Saigon. He remembers being inside the airport after the fighting finished and seeing the many soldiers strewn about. The enemy soldiers were dead, but his fellow Northern fighters were exhausted and sleeping. He himself lay down and drifted into a heavy slumber. When he woke up, he smelled the delicious smell of noodles, which some of his compatriots were cooking in a large pot over a big fire they’d lit using things like mattresses and parts of a bar. They offered him some, but then one of the soldiers chastised Kien for sleeping right next to the nude corpse of a South Vietnamese woman. He hadn’t even noticed until the other soldier pointed it out.
That Kien doesn’t even notice the corpse at first highlights two things: first, that the final days of the war have utterly depleted his energy, and second, that he has become somewhat accustomed to being around death. For the past decade, he has been surrounded by violence and death, so sleeping right next to a dead body perhaps isn’t as alarming as it would be for most people. He has, in other words, become somewhat desensitized to the horrors of war.
Themes
Just then, a large soldier carrying a huge crate of beer burst in. He was clearly ready to celebrate, but he tripped over the naked corpse and dropped the beer. Infuriated, he screamed at her and grabbed her leg, dragging her to the stairs. Kien could hear the sound of her head banging against each step as the big soldier pulled her down. Once outside, the soldier picked up the woman and threw her off the stairs onto the concrete. The soldier who first pointed out the corpse was enraged by the big man’s behavior, so he rushed forward with his gun out, but Kien knocked it toward the sky as the bullets rushed from the barrel.
Although the corpse was a South Vietnamese soldier and thus an enemy, the soldier who initially pointed her out to Kien still recognizes her humanity—she is (or was) more than just a soldier for South Vietnam. She was a human being. Therefore, the soldier doesn’t want his comrades to disrespect her, perhaps because he realizes that the war could so easily have gone differently, putting him and his fellow Northerners in the same position as the helpless corpse.
Themes
The soldier who fired the shots thanked Kien for stopping him from doing something stupid. He had been deeply infuriated by the big soldier’s behavior, but it would have been senseless for him to kill the man. He then suggests that the entire ordeal taught them a good lesson: “Don’t criticize others. Be sure of yourself first.”
Having calmed down after almost killing a fellow soldier, the man who defended the corpse’s honor sets his sights on how, exactly, he should behave in the postwar years to come. He wants this scene to be a lesson, realizing that his anger almost got the best of him, which would have ruined his life. Instead of acting like he's still at war, then, he decides to mind his own business and not resort to violence so quickly. In other words, he realizes that he has to reexamine his violent impulses—impulses that the war certainly encouraged him to cultivate.
Themes
Kien didn’t agree with his compatriot’s point about being “sure of yourself.” The comment made him think about his friend Oanh, who died a few months before Victory Day while his and Kien’s regiment attacked a big police headquarters. Once they got inside, they made their way down the halls and found three people. Kien immediately fired his machine gun, right as Oanh yelled at him to hold his fire, saying that the people were women. It was too late: two of them had already fallen. The third one crumpled at the base of some stairs. She was alive, so Oanh rushed to her. He made sure she was all right and then told her to go outside with her hands up, assuring her that nobody would shoot her. As soon as Oanh turned away, though, the young woman shot him.
The story of Oanh’s death illustrates one of the cruel realities of war, which is that compassion and mercy can be quite dangerous. If Oanh had unhesitatingly killed the woman at the base of the stairs, he wouldn’t have died in this moment. Instead, though, he stopped to show her kindness, and it ended up costing him his life.
Themes
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The young woman would have shot Kien, too, if her gun hadn’t run out of bullets. She pointed the gun at him and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. Enraged that she had killed his friend, he shot her repeatedly with all the bullets in his gun.
Oanh’s death explains Kien’s hesitancy to embrace the idea that the soldier at Saigon airport set forth: namely, that it’s important to show restraint instead of letting violent impulses take over. If Oanh had heeded his own wartime impulses by instantly killing the woman at the base of the stairs, he might still be alive.
Themes
To this day, Kien still remembers the woman’s naked corpse from the Saigon airport on Victory Day. He sees her in his nightmares, and he doesn’t think back to Victory Day with the kind of fondness that most people expect. When he sees depictions of the joyous atmosphere in movies or on TV, he feels at odds with history. In his experience, Victory Day was full of tired, drunk soldiers looting whatever they could—not parades and elation.
Winning the war isn’t what Kien thought it would be. For him, the most important thing about winning is simply that it means the war is over—not necessarily that the North was victorious. After all, the victory doesn’t seem to have led to anything all that admirable, as most of the people around Kien celebrate by devolving into utter chaos, which only increases Kien’s sense of skepticism about whether the war was worth spilling so much blood over.
Themes
