The Jungle of Screaming Souls—where Kien is sent at the end of the Vietnam War to retrieve the corpses of missing soldiers—symbolizes the ways in which trauma and grief often lurk beneath the surface of life. The corpses themselves have sunk into the mud of the jungle, making them very difficult to find. In a way, then, it almost seems as if nothing tragic took place in the area. And yet, it’s Kien’s job to excavate the many bodies so that they aren’t forgotten, a task he comes to see as his “heavenly duty.” This “heavenly duty” isn’t just to drag bodies out of the mud: it’s to ensure that history bears witness to the atrocities that happened during the war. In the same way that the Jungle of Screaming Souls is full of ghosts and bodies despite looking completely unassuming, everyday life in Vietnam eventually resumes as if nothing happened. This discrepancy between the horror of what happened during the war and society’s odd sense of normalcy rankles Kien, ultimately driving him to write about his experiences in the war. In doing so, he essentially excavates the bitter reality of the war from society’s forgetful collective consciousness, dragging it out of obscurity in the same way that he once dragged corpses from the mud. In turn, the Jungle of Screaming Souls comes to represent how quickly and easily even the most monumental tragedies can fade away—unless, that is, people make the effort to keep the memory of such events alive.
The Jungle of Screaming Souls Quotes in The Sorrow of War
Even into early December, weeks after the end of the normal rainy season, the jungles this year are still as muddy as all hell. They are forgotten by peace, damaged or impassable, all the tracks disappearing bit by bit, day by day, into the embrace of the coarse undergrowth and wild grasses.
The name, age, and image of someone who’d been every bit as brave under fire as his comrades, who had set a fine example, suddenly disappeared without a trace.
Except within the mind of Kien. Can’s image haunted him every night, returning during the night to whisper to him by his hammock, repeating the final, gloomy lines he’d spoken by the stream. The whisper would turn into a suffocating gasp, like the sound of water blocking the throat of a drowning man.
The Jungle of Screaming Souls Symbol Timeline in The Sorrow of War
