Soldier’s riveting account is challenging, uncomfortable

It is a territory he knows well. Here, in 1969, his Vietcong battalion was wiped out in encounter with American troops. Kien, one of 10 survivors, is struck by a deep desire to write about the experience, and the highly lyrical narrative he produces — a fragmented, even impressionistic text — betrays his desire to reclaim something, anything positive or creative, from his long wasted years in the jungle.

As a result, The Sorrow of War occasionally resembles an extended prose poem on the misery of conflict.

Memories of drug use and card-playing, “strange and fascinating” moments of calm “fuelled by a passion wanton and unique” are Kien’s defence against his brutal experience of war. He retreats into “wonderful dreams”, into “magical moments” generated by smoking the local vegetation, but none of it is ever enough.

The rifles and the napalm have left more than physical scars on Kien’s body and on his country; always his thoughts return to the “familiar smell of exited fear, of young men soon to burdened with hardships, bullets, hunger and cold”.

The story he tells is one where love is sacrificed and homegrown sexual violence has more impact than a foreign bomb. Graphic horrors have changed all those around him, particularly the life of his childhood sweetheart Phuong.

This new edition of The Sorrow of War presents an “English version” by Australian writer Frank Palmos, working off the original translation by Phan Thanh Hao. Palmos, who served as a foreign correspondent in Asia for many years, brings a keen eye for detail to the prose. His work compliments the dark poetry of an author who served with a Youth Brigade of the North Vietnamese Army and experienced the war directly.

Of the 500 young men who marched with Bao Ninh in 1969, the author, like his protagonist, was one of only 10 to come home.

Nevertheless, he insists that this is not an autobiographical work. He claims Kien is far braver than he ever was. Something of a south-east Asian All Quiet on the Western Front, the brutal honesty of this novel led to it being banned by Vietnam’s Communist Party for contradicting the official message of a government.

Ninh himself was put under house arrest for 10 years, though his manuscript was smuggled out of the country to earn the Independent Foreign Fiction Award abroad.

One can understand why. This is a powerful short work which offers a glimpse into the lives of ordinary Vietnamese soldiers. Highly critical of the propaganda machinery which indoctrinated so many young men, the true tragedy of Ninh’s novel is the manner in which these soldiers grow to view their own civilian population as the enemy.

In this way The Sorrow of War is an uncompromising work, one which makes for uncomfortable reading.

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