The Sorrow of War

"The Sorrow of War was another groundbreaking novel. You can’t not include it. Dương Thu Hương also wrote a novel, Novel Without a Name , about the war. As you’ve noticed many of the books are autobiographical, but they’re novels. For Vietnamese authors, I think that has to do with censorship. It’s a way to write about events in a freer way. It is very powerful. At the time it came out, in the 1990s, the North Vietnamese had been stereotyped as robotic killers and fanatic communists. The Sorrow of War was a revelation for anyone who wanted to hear the other side. Kien, the protagonist, is a soldier with the North Vietnamese Army. He is a sensitive, sorrowful soul, caught up in these terrible, terrible events. The book described, for the first time for English-speaking readers, the terrible suffering of the North Vietnamese troops: the hunger, the disease, the huge casualty rate, the desertion, the political indoctrination, the terrible fate of women. The way he writes is brief, disquieting, it’s very, very effective. Kien is in a tragic, doomed, love affair with Phuong. The gang rape of Phuong by American soldiers was, for me, one of the most chilling, horrible events of any war novel. But Kien retains his humanity throughout the novel. It’s a poignant theme of humanity in war, in spite of all the horrors Kien experienced. Yes. I think the American soldiers had more food, though. The North Vietnamese were fighting under really, really tough conditions."

"This is a great piece of writing and the guy is obviously a talented writer. What struck me about it is the similarity of the feeling between people who just by the grace of God, by luck, were on different sides. He was born in North Vietnam, I was born in a logging town in Oregon. We end up in the same war on different sides and yet the experience of it is so similar for the individual soldier. He, of course, talks about the havoc wreaked on his country, which didn’t happen on our side. But I had a sense of the humanity of ‘the enemy’. We love to pseudospeciate our enemies – in a way you can’t get the job done if you don’t. But reading this piece of writing about an individual soldier in a war on the other side was just very moving for me."