The Sorrow of War Essay

While the Vietnam War was a complex political pursuit that lasted only a few years, the impact of the war on millions of soldiers and civilians extended for many years beyond its termination. Soldiers killed or were killed; those who survived suffered from physical wounds or were plagued by PTSD from being wounded, watching their platoon mates die violently or dealing with the moral implications of their own violence on enemy fighters. Inspired by his experiences in the war, Tim O’Brien, a former soldier, wrote The Things They Carried, a collection of fictional and true war stories that embody the

The author, Tim O'Brien, is writing about an experience of a tour in the Vietnam conflict. This short story deals with inner conflicts of some individual soldiers and how they chose to deal with the realities of the Vietnam conflict, each in their own individual way as men, as soldiers.

The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.

Along with not seeing the bigger picture soldiers lost their ordinary lives due to the war and the contrast was so different between pre and post war that it was hard to cope with life for the men fighting in the war. “For Kien, the most attractive, persistent echo of the past is the whisper of ordinary life, even though the sounds of ordinary life have been washed away by the long storms of war. It is the whispers of friends and ordinary people that are the most horrifying.”(63) The strongest emotions occur as the story unfolds and life takes over from childhood fantasies, destroying individuals and their families as a whole society is remade for instance Kien’s sweetheart before the war. Kien abandons his lover and instead spends the next years plodding through the jungle where everything dies. "no jungle grew again in this clearing. No grass, no plants" (26). He had no true friends and he learned not to fear death but rather wish it. When war ends he has a struggle to rebuild that was once loss, he can no longer see the good of things while he slowly goes insane with out love and hope and of course no sweetheart to aid him. A very sad and classical effect of a war that was worthless to its soldiers and people.

In the book, The Unwanted, it’s a book that tells the true story of a person who stayed behind in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon and who is now living in America. There are lots of scenes that affect me deeply, and those scenes can even change my values. For example, Lam cruelly left two pregnant women behind for himself. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine that a person who leaves two pregnant women behind in order to survive, even if he is the father of those two fetuses. And I feel the especially significant scene is the conversation between Kien and the American soldier.

   Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War is a contrapuntal reading to American literature on the Vietnam War. But rather than stand in stark contrast to Tim O' Brien's The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War is strangely similar, yet different at the same time. From a post-colonialist standpoint, one must take in account both works to get an accurate image of the war. The Sorrow of War is an excellent counterpoint because it is truthful. Tim O' Brien writes: ". . . you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." (O' Brien, 42) Bao Ninh succeeds in this respect. And it was for this reason that the Vietnamese

According to The National Institutes of Health, 20 percent of veterans from the Iraq war suffer from PTSD. The main character deals with the struggles associated with PTSD, which causes him hardship in social and emotional relationships. The struggles not only put pressure on Krebs but also his mother. The author wants to show people the major lasting effects that war can have on people. Krebs, the main character is dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and this shows by the struggles he is having with transitioning from the war setting to the civilian world,being emotionally detached and when he comes home from the war he isolates himself.

In the short story, “On the Rainy River” his book The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien shows the internal conflict he has with himself about entering the Vietnam War. He gets drafted into a war that he hates, and he battles himself on whether or not he wants to fight. He feels like a coward for deciding to fight, but then has to deal with putting his family through the pain and stress of possibly not making it through the war. While O’Brien struggles with his moral convictions against the war, he determines to fight in the Vietnam War to protect his family and defend their honor.

Throughout war literature, fiction or nonfiction, almost every character comes face to face with death. There is no easy way around it, death will always happen. In Tim O’Brien’s, The Things They Carried, death is woven within various stories narrated by the main character, O’Brien himself. Of all the death that O’Brien is surrounded by, the one that may appear to some as “just another kill”, surprisingly leaves the biggest impact. It can be seen as ironic, but after O’Brien had thrown the grenade that killed this enemy soldier, he finally received the reality check of the Vietnam War. Not only was there a reality check, but O’Brien’s storytelling about this soldier gave a whole new meaning to death itself.

In the novel, The Sorrow of War we find that Kien is telling the story from his point of view as a North Vietnamese soldier during the Vietnam war. The Author, Bao Ninh, tells his experiences and memories of the war through the Character known as Kien. Through these memories, we can find some ideal differences between North and South Vietnam.

“His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut…” (118, TTTC). O’Brien illustrates the corpse of the young man very graphically, mentioning the “slight tear at the lobe of the ear”, the loss of “the upper lip and gum and teeth”, the disjointed head, and the wounded, bloody neck, along with the cheek peeled back in ragged stripes, looking almost animated (122, TTTC). The writer repeatedly recites the explicit descriptions in order to express the soldier’s own obsession with the chilling experience that leaves him nothing but mute. While Kiowa, his companion, urges him to talk about the traumatic event, Tim O’Brien instead, formulates his own story concerning the lifeless, Vietnamese man, the man whom he knew nothing of- the belief that the man wasn’t a fighter judging from the “bony legs, a narrow waist, long shapely fingers”, with a sunken chest and the “wrist of a child” (118, TTTC). He suspects that the man wasn’t into politics; rather he liked books and mathematics, with the hopes of becoming a teacher or scholar someday, however, had no choice but to partake in the war due to the underlying fear of bringing disgrace upon himself and his family. O’Brien more or less, inflicts his own life story and internal

In The Sorrow of War, Kien goes through the effects of PTSD and Agent Orange from the Vietnam War. Kien went through PTSD and had awful nightmares about his friends dying and coming back to haunt him. He also had a terrible drinking problem and drank himself to sleep every night in order to release the demons. According to a survey by the Veterans Administration, some 500,000 of the 3 million troops who served in Vietnam suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and rates of divorce, suicide, alcoholism and drug addiction were markedly higher among veterans (History). Also, Agent Orange was an awful disease that made people die, be diagnosed with cancer, or brain damage. Kien was in the jungle and

Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a novel depicts the horrors that are a result of war. Kien is the main character whose life is used to depict these horrors; a soldier who’s lost all his comrades, lost his love, and lost his path. Kien’s life is made to be extremely harsh and extremely undesirable by the readers. The novel starts off with Kien gathering the remains of his fellow fallen soldiers, this gathering seems to be the trigger for

The style of writing used by Bao Ninh in The Sorrow of War is also highly significant because almost every occurrence involving Kien was chaotic and highly unorganized. Throughout the novel, Ninh includes several flashbacks in which Kien almost entirely involuntarily revisited a memory of his, generated from his personal experiences during the Vietnam War. By including these flashbacks, Ninh inevitably merges the past and present. This further illustrates the fact that the past experiences of trauma still linger with their victims in the present. An example of this is found in the beginning of the novel, when Kien was trying to sleep but couldn't. Every time he closed his eyes, he would see the faces of dead soldiers. Because Kien is constantly

For this review I choose a book called “The Sorrow of War”, which was written by Bao Ninh. Ninh fought for the North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and recounts his time as soldier. He served in the 27th Youth Brigrade in 1969 when he was 17. Ninh was one of only 10 soldiers in the brigade that survived the war. From just before the war started to the end, and all of his experiences throughout the war. Instead of using his own name to tell about his experiences he used a character named Kien. During the time it was