[.ca] The Sorrow of War (War Promo) (ISBN 009948353X)

Marine Corps Vietnam Veteran:
In 1965, I went to Vietnam as an 18-year old Marine private and spent a full year's tour in operations against both North Vietnamese regular forces and the Viet Cong. I survived okay, never got wounded. I returned to the US and spent three years stateside and after reenlistment (surely a sign of mental illness, NOBODY in the Marine Corps in their right mind reenlisted during the Vietnam War years), I spent a year in Vietnamese language school in Arlington, Virginia, studying the Hanoi dialect. I went back to Vietnam in 1969 as an interrogator-translator and spent a year with the Fifth Marines in the An Hoa basin, made famous, incidentally, by James Webb's masterpiece of war-"Fields of Fire". In any event, I found myself face to face with North Vietnamese soldiers and actually able to communicate with them in their own language. As the year went by, simply by virtue of constant contact, I found myself growing fairly adept with the language. Many of my interrogations were conducted out in the field, usually at the company level, and with a great deal of haste, considering the hostile situation we were in. However, if I was conducting the interrogation at the regimental base camp and had the time, I would ask more questions of the men whom we had captured and began to ask them of their lives before being sent to South Vietnam. Those that would talk to me (not all did, naturally) revealed themselves to be just human beings like the rest of us and felt incredible attachments to their families whom they had left behind. In 1992, I was still on active duty, but this time in the Air Force, as a language instructor at the Air Force Academy, when I was asked to return to Vietnam and work in the MIA program. Going back after over 20 years, I was surprised that by virtue of my dormant but still functional Vietnamese language ability, I was still able to talk to many people about the war and how it had affected them. Until now, I have read no literary work that encompassed all the emotions that seemed to be just below the surface in the North Vietnamese veterans whom I met during my third year in Vietnam. Bao Ninh's excellent work "The Sorrow of War" probes into the mind of that other "Vietnam veteran" and reveals that all veterans of sustained combat share many of the cascading emotions that such suffering generates. Many times I saw faces on the streets of Hanoi that reflected the same emotions that I saw etched on the faces of my fellow Marines after a long operation. These same emotions are revealed in the faces of my fellow veterans over thirty years after our passage through fire in Vietnam. This is a book for all time and surely ranks up there with "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "A Farewell to Arms." A literary masterpiece that will touch you whether or not Vietnam was in your past or still in your present.

What war does to human beings:
When visiting Vietnam last year, a man stopped me outside the war rememberance museum in Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon. He carried a shrink wrapped stack of books three feet high and tried to sell me a knock-off copy of "The Sorrow of War". When I told him I'd read it, he broke into a bright smile. He then offered to sell me Greene's "The Quiet American". When I told him I'd read that too, his eyes sparkled, his smile stretched and he put his arm around my shoulders. He took me to meet his friends. He said something in Vietnamese to them. All of a sudden I felt like I was a rediscovered lost relative. "The Sorrow of War" is a book that's not so much read as experienced. There is no escaping the intensity and naked reality presented. The author is a survivor of the American War who fought in the North Vietnamese Army, but Bao Ninh is kind to neither the North Vietnamese Army nor the Americans and its allies. There's no romanticism in this novel, only honesty. Originally banned by the Communist government, the book proved so popular that the government reconsidered and lifted the ban. It's now a national treasure. In my next life, when I'm a teacher, I will assign this to my class to be read back-to-back with Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried". These books could stop a war.

A haunting memoir of the War.:
The author was a North Vietnamese "bo doi" who was sent south to liberate Saigon. He participated in many battles in central Vietnam. The world of the "bo doi" like that of any soldier was dominated by fears of death, desertion, drug use, and nightmares. Ghosts haunted them almost daily and forests scared them. Despite their sacrifices, they did not get any recognition when they came home from the war: no drums, no music and had to resign to live with "broken dreams and with pain". The stress of the war was too much for many of them: they got drunk, fought with their wives or girl friends, experienced nightmares, wild mood changes, and rage. They suffered from the full range of post traumatic stress disorders American soldiers were experiencing on their return from the war. And above all, they questioned themselves whether the war was worth it.

the power of memory:
It's Wilfred Owen reincarnated in a prose that is at once a searing recount of the inhumanity of mass violence and a tale of redemption and reappropriation of the collective self against the madness of war. The seemingly tortured narrative flow mirrors the author's own pain in his attempts to come to terms with the loss war visits on its victims. The book is a poignant universal call to end, once and for all, the dark clouds of machine gun fire.

My class loves this book:
I belong to the young generation of vietnameses who were born and grewth up in Hanoi, the city of Kien and Phuong. I read this novel in 1992 or 1993 when I was a student, it's original name was "Destiny of Love" (Than phan tinh yeu). The book was passed around by my classmates and everyone was very impressed about it. The author has successfully described the romaintic of the first love beetwen Kien and Phuong as well as the fierceness of the war. Reading this book is the good way to know more about Vietname war and about Hanoi people. I strongly recommend this novel.