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Summary: Marine Corps Vietnam Veteran
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A good depiction of the North's view of the war
Review: In whole, I believe that this book gives a very vivid description of a Northern Vietnamese soldier's encounter with the war; however, I found the book to be somewhat confusing in the way it goes back in forth between past and present. The author's use of flashbacks in the novel make it more difficult for one to grasp the story than if it was written chronologically.
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Summary: the power of memory
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A great detalied book!
Review: Most times when you hear about Vietnam you think of some jungle place where Americans fought a war. But in the book,Sorrows Of War by Bao Ninh, you can really undrerstand what war and the country of Vietnam are about. The book is about a guy named Kien who was a North Vietnamese soldier who was fighting the Americans. But the story is not about how he bragged of killing the enemy. It is about Kiens life before his war days and what the outcome of the war has brought to his home life. It is sad to see how war is and how it should never be thought of being exciting to kill people. The book is not to popular in the some country's for the book is straight from Vietnam and is mostly sold there. But if you have a chance to read it it is a very good book. It is a bit hard to understand because some English words are spelled differently but you can understand what the author is talking about, but overall I rate the Sorrows Of War a 4 star out of 5 star book!
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Summary: War is sorrow indeed
Review: Not until the last few pages of the book did I learn that the novel is comprised of Kien's reminiscences that were put into book form by a nameless ex-soldier like Kien who had happened to pick up the manuscript from a mute girl who had been living with Kien. This unexpected ending explains the montage style of the novel and its lack of a narrative plot. The author should have prepared the reader by informing him of the author's narrative intentions, in the way that Tolstoy does in "Hadji Murad". The story is very much like Duong Thu Huong's Novel Without a Name in that it is a lament by Kien on the losses caused by war . Duong Thu Huong's book, I think, is much better because she is more adept at characterization and general descriptions, which are more vividly compelling than those of Ninh's. Bao Ninh's book really does not have a unifying narrative but is rather made up mainly of sentimental reminiscences and flashbacks, even more than in Huong's book. There is practically no action at all taking place in the present tense, though the book itself is supposed to be a recording of Kien's thoughts and actions at the present moment. And though the nameless compiler of Kien's manuscript admits to these facts, this style of writing makes the book very boring to read, since it is like a diary, always regressing instead of progressing. The compiler's justification for Kien's style of writing is the sorrow of war: "However, the sorrows of war had been much heavier for this author than they had been for me. His sorrows prevented him from relaxing by continually enticing him back into his past." Ironically, it was this sorrow of war that helped pull people through the war by forcing them to wistfully long for a stable past: "It was a sublime sorrow, more sublime than happiness, and beyond suffering. It was thanks to our sorrow that we were able to escape war, escape the continual killing and fighting, the terrible conditions of battle and the unhappiness of men in fierce and violent theaters of war." These people hoped that once the war ended they would return to a society like the one they had longed for. On the contrary, people returned to a society so changed by the vicissitude of war that they are unable to cope with the present. Once again they revert to reminiscing, even about the horrors of war, in order to find sustenance to carry them through life. The most moving and vivid part of the book is when Kien and Phuong are stranded in Thanh Hoa because their train has been destroyed by an American air raid. The time when Phuong is gang raped by several men in the train caboose marks the turning point in each person's path in life. Though passionately in love since childhood, Kien and Phuong are forever changed by irrevocable events. Though they meet again after the war, they can never again mend the broken string of innocent youthful love, for she has become a Magdalene whore figure. With her passionately magnetic character, Phuong comes off the pages as being so much more vivid and interesting than Kien. She is a fresh change from the typical tradition-upholding, docile, selfless Vietnamese women often portrayed in literature. Bao Ninh does not need to have Phuong redeem her "sins" as Kieu does (through her eternally devoted love and filial piety), for her sins are not hers but rather should be blamed on the mercilessness of war. Like her, everyone touched upon by the war has in some way lost their innocence. As with Novel Without a Name, this book does away with the "heroic" genre of socialist realism that was the prescribed convention since the anti-French days. The glorified soldier who fought for some future glory has been turned into a disenchanted man whose only consolation in life is the past.
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Summary: Vietnam
Review: One of the best books on any subject I have ever read. Like a previous reviewer I bought a copy from a poor child on the streets of Saigon out of convenience not intending to read it. What a loss that would have been. There's more than one side to every story-the perspective here is humanity.
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Summary: The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
Review: Powerful, unforgettable. Truly universalizes the human condition. The characters are people, just like you, just like me; not the "enemies" we've seen depicted in movies about the Vietnam war. Should be required reading for a social studies or history class. I rarely buy a book to add to my library, but this one has to be kept. I will make sure my children read this when they get older.
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Summary: A haunting memoir of the War.
Review: 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.
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Summary: A Book That Will Break Your Heart
Review: The media has made sure that all of us are aware of the Vietnam conflict. Readers and movie goers the world over are now familiar with America's suffering in Vietnam and the problems American veterans have endured as they attempted to adjust to civilian life. Although all life is irreplacible, the fact remains that the United States lost fewer than a million men in the Vietnam conflict and their social institutions and infrastructure remained relatively intact. The Vietnamese, however, lost two million men and their culture, society, landscape and tradition were literally obliterated. Despite this destruction, their side of this horrendous story has seldom been told. Worse yet, when it is told, they are often portrayed in the most unattractive of all light. Until only a few years ago, the Vietnamese were portrayed by the media as a faceless people with no identity; entities not worth caring about. The turning point came with the publication, in Dutch, of Duong Thu Huong's Blind Paradise in 1994. This landmark book was followed by Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War. War novels deal, superficially, with war. But underneath all the blood and horror and carnage lie far deeper social and human issues. The best novels of war, such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War, also deal with the makeup and morality of a culture or a society gone wrong. The protagonist of these books, whether real or fictional, often endures a harrowing personal struggle through both a public and private hell and usually undergoes some sort of redemption, even if that redemption results in death. Born in 1952, Bao Ninh served in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade during the Vietnam conflict. Of the five hundred youths who went to war with this brigade in 1969, Bao Ninh was one of its ten survivors, so it is not unusual that war should be the subject of his first book, considering the impact it has had on his life. Semi-autobiographical in nature, the protagonist of The Sorrow of War, Kien, is the lone survivor of his brigade and a ten year veteran of the war. As the book opens he is serving as part of an MIA body collection team. It is through his memories that we slowly learn how the war has devastated his youth and the youth of his countrymen. In an attempt to purge himself of the demons of war and the hopelessness of the present, Kien writes, merging his memories of the past with his images of the present. For Kien, writing is the only way he can perform his last duty as a soldier, a duty he sees as being "to expose the realities of war and to tear aside conventional images." In prose that ranges from the horrific to the poetic, Ninh relates memories and images of death and destruction, anguish and sorrow. Yet, underneath all of this loss lies a bittersweet love story, the true story of Ninh and his childhood sweetheart who were parted forever by the war. It is Ninh's personal recollections that make this book the saddest and most sorrwful story ever written. Nowhere has there ever been a more tragic tale of unnecessary loss and suffering and destruction. And there is no redemption. For all the suffering and loss endured at every level of Vietnamese life--the loss of youth, family, life, tradition and love--is all in vain. The future that Kien fought for as a youth never materializes, and, in the meantime, he loses all that was ever meaningful to him, all that he has ever held dear and close to his heart. This is the real sorrow and loss and tragedy of war and it is a tragedy we all must share, no matter who or where we are. The Sorrow of War is a book that will change your life but it is also a book that will break your heart.
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Summary: The Best War Story : Tragedy and Sorrow Unmasked
Review: This book is a classic that can be lined up with Michael Herr's "Dispatches" and "All Quiet on the Western Front". Read and experience the raw power of tragedy and sorrow that only those who were there can tell us. In the end, realize the futility of war and the sorrow that it brings...
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