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
It’s the wet season of 1975 in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Kien is part of a military team tasked with finding the remains of soldiers who have gone missing in action. But the Remains-Gathering Team is unable to do much during the wet season, since the jungles are too muddy to trek through. It isn’t until December that Kien and the other soldiers can finally make their way toward the Jungle of Screaming Souls, where many unfortunate fighters died gruesomely in violent combat. Until now, their bodies have been encased in mud and hidden by the eerie, overgrown jungle.
The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975. What’s more, the wet season in Vietnam generally runs from June to November. It’s evident, then, that The Sorrow of War begins in the direct aftermath of the Vietnam War, as Kien is tasked with returning to the area where horrific battles took place just months before. And yet, although the memory of the war is still fresh, the actual physical evidence of such horror is buried deep in the mud—a reality that symbolically aligns with the human and societal tendency to bury traumatic memories.
Themes
Kien is all too familiar with the Jungle of Screaming Souls. He was part of the 27th Battalion, which in the dry season of 1969 found itself surrounded by enemy forces in this very jungle. Napalm coursed through the area and lit everything in a horrible blaze, trapping the members of the 27th Battalion in a hellish landscape. Only 10 soldiers survived, the others either burning to death or desperately running into waves of enemy bullets. Kien now recognizes the clearing where this horror took place: no vegetation has managed to grow back.
It's clear early in the novel that Kien has witnessed some truly terrifying things. Although he managed to escape the Vietnam War with his life intact, this ultimately means he has a whole new challenge ahead of him—that is, learning to live with such traumatic memories, which the novel suggests is an unfortunate cost of survival. On another note, Kien’s observation that the vegetation hasn’t grown back builds on the symbolic function that nature plays in the novel, as the failure of the plant life to regrow comes to represent just how hard it is to return to normalcy after violence and destruction.
Themes
Kien remembers the terrible slaughter of the 27th Battalion. He himself was shot in the side and fell into a shallow creek, where he then lay for several days. When the American troops left the area, massive rains came. Kien managed to haul himself along the banks of the river, finding countless water-logged corpses as he went. He was sure he would die, as snakes and centipedes crawled through his wounds. And though nobody talks about the “Lost Battalion” anymore, Kien knows that the gruesome bloodshed that took place in this area gave rise to many lost souls, which now flit through the jungle and moan, letting their cries carry on the wind. Their howls are the reason the area is called the Jungle of Screaming Souls.
The Sorrow of War is full of stories about ghosts and wandering souls. The soldiers looking for corpses in the Jungle of Screaming Souls feel haunted by the memory of the many fighters who went missing in action, and though the novel takes these stories about ghosts at face value, it also uses the stories to speak metaphorically about the ways in which traumatic memories linger. The soldiers really seem to believe that the jungle is full of wandering souls, and the novel doesn’t challenge this belief—it simply uses it to underscore how hard it is to move on from the horrors of war.
Themes
There are also civilian spirits in the Jungle of Screaming Souls. Long ago, there was a small village in the area, but it was consumed by disease. By the time soldiers reached the vicinity, they found the village completely abandoned. Unsettled by the empty homes and the specter of illness and death, they burned the village. Still, they avoided the charred remains—until, that is, “Lofty” Thinh from one of the squads went into the village and shot an orangutan. He summoned other soldiers to help him drag the kill back to camp, but when they skinned the animal, it looked exactly like the corpse of a sickly woman. Kien helped “Lofty” and the others bury it, but it didn’t do any good: the corpse’s soul still haunted everyone, and they all died in battle—except Kien.
The story about “Lofty” shooting an orangutan highlights the ways in which the constant violence and terror of war can lead to superstition. The novel doesn’t suggest that the men are wrong to fear the corpse, but the entire episode does suggest that the soldiers are particularly on guard when it comes to protecting themselves. Because of the perpetual state of fear they live in, they want to insulate themselves from danger in any way possible, which ultimately means respecting superstition. In turn, superstition itself becomes a defense mechanism of sorts, though not one that actually works—an illustration of just how difficult it was to survive in the Vietnam War.
Themes
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