The Sorrow of War

The Sorrow of War

By Bao Ninh

Secker & Warburg, 1993. 217 pp., $24.95 (pb)

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/7024

The one voice rarely heard from the Vietnam War is that of the Vietnamese, drowned by the babel of Hollywood, official Western historians and politicians. Bao Ninh, a soldier in the North Vietnam Army (NVA) has written a novel, now available in our mainstream bookshops, about the war from a Vietnamese soldier's perspective.

Bao Ninh was a soldier in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade of the NVA, which started out with 500 members in 1969 and finished the war with only 10 survivors. His novel is semi-autobiographical, tracing the life of an NVA soldier, Kien, one of 10 survivors of the "Unlucky Battalion", which was massacred by US napalm and helicopter gunships in an ambush in an area subsequently known as the Jungle of Screaming Souls.

Kien's other war experiences are equally horrific, surrounded by "broken bodies, bodies blown apart, bodies vaporised", with "blood, mad killing and brutality" warping all combatants in the war. The course of the war taxes his psychological stamina — it "seemed endless, desperate and leading nowhere".

A native plant, rosa canina, does for the Vietnamese what marijuana did for the US soldiers: "one smoked to forget the daily hell of the soldiers' life, smoked to forget hunger and suffering. Also to forget death. And totally, but totally, to forget tomorrow."

Kien, like Bao after the war, writes a novel to try to come to grips with the trauma. His heroes turn out to be "not the usual, predictable, stiff figures" of war romanticism; rather they are "inconsistent and contradictory", capable of cruelty, cowardliness, desertion, rape and other behaviour which the brigade's political commissar struggles to overcome.

Kien, and Bao, also have negative feelings about the postwar peace. The "burning will which was once Vietnam's salvation" is now gone. The peace is as "vulgar and cruel" as the war — "our history-making efforts ... have been to no avail". These thoughts of Bao are representative of those in Vietnam who have been disoriented by the failure of the victory to yield a better life.

Bao, however, has little understanding of how the US economic embargo and the military attacks of Pol Pot and China substantially contributed to the stagnation of Vietnamese economic and cultural life.

He is content to toss off a few derogatory comments about Marxist professors and Communists as the cause of the problem. They appear in the novel as some alien factor in the resistance. This was clearly not the case — even the better-informed Western intelligence agencies acknowledged the popular support for the Communist-led resistance.

Bao avoids engagement with the political nature of the war — he favours the powerful and gritty, but largely apolitical, style of war novel. So the April 1975 liberation of Saigon, for Kien, is not the one of "cheering, flags, flowers, triumphant soldiers and joyful people" but is spent in a drunken stupor near a murdered prostitute. There is no "soaring and brilliant happiness" of the liberation; the "painful, bitter and sad" peace begins immediately.

Kien's is one reality of Vietnam (the novel, after all, is not a best-seller in Vietnam without reason) but it is not the only reality — there was a moral and political grandeur to the war and the defeat of imperialism (even if novels which reflect this are called propaganda, not art, by the defeated West).

Even Bao feels this other reality in part. The war experiences he relates draw their narrative holding power from the inspiring courage and self-sacrifice of Vietnamese guerillas, a readiness to die for the cause of national liberation and dignity which "raised the name of Vietnam high and proud, creating a spiritual beauty in the horrors of conflict".

This insight counterbalances to some extent Bao's apolitical stance, his "drift over the edge from logic" to the world of ghosts and "mystical occurrences in the jungle" and his pessimism. For all the ugliness and bleakness he portrays, the war years were "caring days, when we knew what we were living and fighting for, and why we needed to suffer and sacrifice. These were the days when all of us were young, very pure and very sincere."

However hedged with qualification and contradiction (the bits which make the novel acceptable to Western publishing firms), this conclusion stands as something we should never forget about the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.