The Sorrow of War explores how trauma can impact memory, suggesting that disturbing recollections of violence and destruction can reorder how a person thinks. For Kien, a former soldier for North Vietnam, traumatic memories of the Vietnam War cause him to constantly relive the worst days of his life, as he frequently loses himself in vivid scenes from his past—scenes that make it impossible for him to find peace and contentment in his postwar life. Instead of trying to run from these memories, though, Kien ends up embracing them by writing a novel about his wartime experiences. The novel itself (which is, for all intents and purposes, The Sorrow of War) is extremely fragmented, as Kien’s memories blend together and present themselves without a clear timeline. This lack of order or chronology, it seems, is a byproduct of Kien’s trauma: his memories are so overwhelming that they surge up in the most unlikely moments, drowning out the present with their intensity. For instance, Kien will describe the experience of looking for dead bodies as part of a Remains-Gathering Team at the end of the war, but then a ghostly sound in the jungle will suddenly send him reeling back to a troubling memory from the early years of the war, making it clear that he’s powerless in the face of such visceral recollections.
And yet, reliving these harrowing experiences also offers Kien a certain kind of comfort. Of course, it’s torturous to revisit these emotional wounds, but looking back also means thinking about the happiness, hope, and optimism he used to have as a young soldier. In particular, memories of his prewar romance with Phuong—his high school sweetheart—bring him a genuine sense of happiness. In fact, these memories are so rewarding that Kien comes to take comfort in his ability to revisit them. The future, he feels, has been ruined by the horrors of war, but he can still revel in the memory of his own prewar happiness. In turn, the novel presents a bittersweet portrait of what it means to move on from intense trauma, ultimately suggesting that happy memories can sometimes be as powerful as traumatic ones.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Memory, Trauma, and Moving On ThemeTracker
Memory, Trauma, and Moving On 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 humid atmosphere condenses, its long moist, chilly fingers sliding in and around the hammock where Kien lies shivering, half-awake, half-asleep, as though drifting along on a stream. He is floating, sadly, endlessly, sometimes as if on a truck driving silently, robotlike, somnambulantly through the lonely jungle tracks. The stream moans, a desperate complaint mixing with distant faint jungle sounds, like an echo from another world. The eerie sounds come from somewhere in a remote past, arriving softly like featherweight leaves falling on the grass of times long, long ago.
The tasty canina had many wondrous attributes. They could decide what they’d like to dream about, or even blend the dreams, like preparing a wonderful cocktail. With canina one smoked to forget the daily hell of the soldier’s life, smoked to forget hunger and suffering. Also, to forget death. And totally, but totally, to forget tomorrow.
One southern soldier behind a tree fired hastily and the full magazine of thirty rounds from his AK exploded loudly around Kien, but he had walked on unharmed. Kien had not returned fire even when just a few steps from his prey, as though he wanted to give his enemy a chance to survive, to give him more time to change magazines, or time to take sure aim and kill him.
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.
At the bottom of his heart he believes he exists on this earth to perform some unnamed heavenly duty. A task that is sacred and noble, but secret. He begins to believe that it is because of this heavenly duty that he had such a brief childhood and adolescence, then matured in time of war. The duty imposed on him in his first forty years a succession of suffering with very few joys. […]
The first time he had felt this secret force was not on the battlefield but in peacetime, on his postwar MIA missions gathering the remains of the dead. […]
From the time of that realization he felt that day by day his soul was gradually maturing, preparing for its task of fulfilling the sacred, heavenly duty of which the novel would become the earthly manifestation.
When starting this novel, the first in his life, he planned a postwar plot. He started by writing about the MIA Remains-Gathering Team, those about-to-be-demobilized soldiers on the verge of returning to ordinary civilian life.
But relentlessly, his pen disobeyed him. Each page revived one story of death after another and gradually the stories swirled back deep into the primitive jungles of war, quietly restoking his horrible furnace of war memories.
When later he recalled his actions, her words, his timidity, he would grieve and regret his loss.
The passing of beautiful youth had been so rapid that even its normal periods of anxiety and torment, of deep intense blind love, had been taken from him as the war clouds loomed. A moment so close, yet so far, then totally lost to him, to remain only as a memory forever.
“No. I mean it. That slob gave us a sort of warning: Don’t criticize others. Be sure of yourself first.”
Kien frowned, then walked away. “Be sure of yourself first, what a joke!” Kien said to himself. He recalled Oanh’s death a month earlier, the morning his regiment attacked the police headquarters at Buon Me Thuot.
“There’s no other night like this. You’re offering your life for a cause so I’ve decided to waste mine too. This year we’re both seventeen. Let’s plan to meet each other again somewhere at some future point. See if we still love each other as much as we do now.”
But at the last moment, as he was about to press the trigger with the gun aimed directly at them, he gave them a reprieve.
It was not because of their pleading, nor because of prompting from his colleagues. No, it was because Phuong’s words had come to him like an inner voice: “So, you’ll kill lots of men? That’ll make you a hero, I suppose?”
“[…] It’s over. We deserved to have had a happy life together, but events conspired against us. You know that. You know the circumstances as well as I do. Let’s go our own separate ways from now on. Forever. It’s the only way.”
And so their intimate nonsense had continued for the next hour, a period of delirious romantic joy in extraordinary circumstances.
He suddenly remembered what he thought he had seen in the freight car and what could still be happening there. He was to remember that as his first war wound, […].
It was from that moment, when Phuong was violently taken from him, that the bloodshed truly began and his life entered into bloody suffering and failure. And he would understand true sacrifice: friends who would die to save others.
Not one of them asked about Hoa. At first he found it disagreeably strange. Then, with its acceptance, he too began to forget about her. Was it that such sacrifices were now an everyday occurrence? Or that they were expected, even of such young people? Or worse, that they were too concerned worrying about their own safety to bother with others?
It all seemed so long ago, and because he couldn’t even find the head-shaped rock—it had been blown apart or washed away—it seemed a touch unlikely that it had ever happened. Of course it had, but not even finding the clearing where he had last seen her allowed him that escape into such possibilities.
What remained was sorrow, the immense sorrow, the sorrow of having survived. The sorrow of war.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were injured? Sit down, sit down. We’ll bandage it. Does it hurt?”
Phuong shook her head, No.
“Sit down. I’ll make some bandages from my shirt.”
“No!” she cried, pushing him away. “Can’t you see? It’s not a wound! It can’t be bandaged!”
What was going on? He knew so little!
Several years later, on a night when he was deep in desperation, Kien dreamed that his life had been transformed into a river stretching before him. He saw himself floating towards his death. Then at the very last moment, when he was about to go over the edge, he heard Phuong’s call echoing from that bitter dusk of the marsh near the school. It was the final call of his first love. Though they hadn’t had a happy life together or moved towards a glowing future, their first love had not been in vain. They were back there in the past together, and nothing could change or rob them of that.
