The Sorrow of War

by Bao Ninh

  ‘It’s Ho Bia’s! This is Ho Bia’s bra!’ he whispered, raising the bra to his lips. ‘Oh, darling, where did they take you? Why? You were so innocent! Why would they hurt you? What can we do?’

  Thinh sobbed and moaned, uttering urgent prayers in a despairing voice.

  Later, many years later, while watching a pantomime where an artist bent over, writhing his body in agonised desperation, by magical association Kien recalled the moments when Thinh had similarly crouched in sobbing despair, praying for Ho Bia.

  The audience around him in the theatre had seen Kien suddenly sit bolt upright, remembering the war scene clearly. His attention on the pantomime faded as the sharp detail of the tragic love story of his men and the three farm girls unfolded in his mind. He drifted off into a reverie as he dreamed of that day, blind to the pantomime before him.

  How deeply moved he was, and how he trembled at the joy and the pain the memories brought. He wanted to etch into his heart these memories, and wondered how he could have forgotten this tragedy for so many years.

  It was almost dark that same day before they found the commandos’ hiding-place. They had not killed the three girls on their own farm, but had chosen to take them down the valley, away from the farm. The rain had erased their tracks and it was by total chance that Kien’s platoon had discovered the seven commandos at the foot of a hill.

  They had ambushed the commandos, killing three of them in the first attack and capturing the remaining four at gunpoint.

  ‘Lofty’ Thinh, one of the lovers, was killed in close fighting, getting a bullet through his heart. No time for tears or for vengeance. He fell, his face to the earth, without seeing Ho Bia again.

  Kien stood before the captured men. They were not tied up, but they were exhausted from their lost battle, their clothes torn, filthy with mud and blood, offering no further resistance. They stood still and silent, shuffling their feet but indifferent to questions.

  ‘Where are the three girls?’ he asked calmly.

  No answer.

  ‘Well, where are they? If they’re still alive, you might live.’

  The biggest of the four commandos, his left eye torn away by a bullet, looked over at Kien with his good eye. Blood and mud ran down his cheeks. He laughed scornfully, showing white teeth.

  ‘The girls? We sacrificed them to the Water Spirit, sir. We used their bodies as an offering. They cried and carried on like crazy.’

  Kien’s scouts drew their bayonets. Kien held them back.

  ‘Stop! Don’t. Perhaps these guys might also want to cry like crazy as the girls did before they died. They won’t want to die immediately, will they?’

  ‘Motherfucker! Kill us if you like!’ another of them shouted. ‘Look at my hands, look, red from the bitches’ blood!’

  ‘Shut up!’ Kien said. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll do as you wish. I just want to know something. You came here to track us, the regular army, right? So why attack them? Why kill three young girls so brutally?’

  No answer.

  Kien cursed himself for wasting his time on them. Worse, he’d even been polite.

  He ordered them to dig their own graves.

  The four of them dug a common grave, digging quickly, enthusiastically, as though they were on contract.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be so deep, it’s just for lying down in so that arms and legs won’t show,’ said Kien. ‘And hurry up! It’ll soon be dark.’

  Each of the four had a shovel, the usual collapsible multipurpose sharp tools. They were all healthy, muscled men. They dug violently, digging, scooping, throwing. The hole widened, deepened, then began to fill with reddish water.

  ‘That’s enough, get out!’ Kien ordered. He explained: ‘You have to get out before you throw in the bodies of your three friends. You don’t want to leave them to stink up the forest, do you?’

  They asked permission to wash and have a last cigarette. Kien agreed, but his troops were not satisfied.

  One said, ‘Why string it out? Give them some bronze candy!’ It was the troops’ slang for bullets.

  ‘I can’t stand these four arseholes either,’ said Kien. ‘They’ll be treated like dogs before they die, but there’s something I have to know.’

  The four southern commandos went down to the stream and washed their hands slowly, carefully. They also washed the blood from their uniforms, then returned.

  ‘Please have a cigarette, sir!’ said the youngest of them, a round-faced, pale-skinned boy who spoke with a sweet northern accent. He politely offered the Rubi cigarette, offering it in cupped hands to Kien.

  ‘Keep it!’ Kien waved him away. ‘Offer it to your pals when you’re under the ground.’

  The young commando sighed, then looked imploringly at Kien, lowering his voice. ‘Sir, the one who has been impolite to you is our commander. Yes, he’s a lieutenant.’

  ‘Is he? Well, he’ll just be an ordinary soldier below ground. Not your commander, so forget it, don’t worry.’

  ‘Please don’t kill me,’ the young man said. ‘I didn’t rape any of those girls. I didn’t stab them even once. I swear I didn’t. I’m a Catholic.’

  ‘You don’t have to swear to me. Back in your line!’ Kien replied.

  But the young man, tears running down his cheeks, kneeled down in front of Kien. ‘Please take pity on me, sir, I’m still so young, sir. I have an old mother. I’m going to get married. We love each other, I beg you!’

  Trembling, he took a leather purse from his pocket and from it produced a small coloured photograph which he placed in Kien’s hands. Kien held the photo, looking at it. A young girl wearing a black swimming-costume stood with her back to the sea. She smiled happily, her wavy hair surrounding her face and covering her shoulders. She held an ice-cream in one hand and waved with the other. A tiny, graceful wave from a girl so beautiful that he could look at her forever. Kien wiped the raindrops from the photo and handed it back to the boy.

  ‘She’s beautiful. Nice photo. Put it away or it’ll get wet.’

  The commando gasped, his mouth dry. His eyes shone with hope. ‘You mean you’ll let me live? Really? Oh, thank God!’

  ‘Back to your hole!’ shouted Kien. ‘Son of a bitch! Light your last smoke, or your time is up! You others too, be quick!’

  The young man joined the three others who now sat on the edge of the grave dangling their feet over the bodies of their three mates who had been tossed into the hole. Around the scene light blue cigarette-smoke, warm and pleasant, drifted lazily into the drizzle of rain. Darkness was descending from the slopes and the stream gurgled around them.

  ‘Now!’ said Kien, pulling the AK from his shoulder. ‘Line up!’

  The four pale faces looked up, afraid and intense.

  ‘Stand up, in one row,’ Kien repeated casually, pressing his thumb into the trigger guard in the sub-machine-gun. ‘Move!’

  ‘Sir, let us finish our cigarette!’ It was the same young man with the northern accent.

  ‘Stand up!’ Kien shouted again.

  ‘Let them finish, Kien,’ a scout whispered hoarsely into Kien’s ear.

  The condemned men stood up, leaning against each other. Imminent death had left them fearless, their faces hardened. They looked with hatred at Kien, who became angry as he looked at them sneering at death.

  ‘So, you don’t mind dying? I’ll satisfy you, with as much blood as you want. Like you did the girls.’ Kien was shouting, then laughing grimly.

  He fired. Over their heads.

  The young northern Catholic began crying. He rushed forward to Kien and knelt, his face on Kien’s feet. Whining, praying, sobbing, he writhed close to the ground, but no words came.

  ‘You’re volunteering to go first?’ asked Kien, placing the gun-barrel against the boy’s forehead.

  ‘No, please, let me live, I beg all of you! Let me live, I pray, sir, I beg you!’ Kien shoved the barrel hard on his head and the young commando fell back. The blow seemed to bring him to his senses and he sto
pped crying. Still kneeling, he raised himself slightly, looking wearily around first at Kien, then the others. His hands wandered over his wound. A cut on his forehead had started blood streaming down his nose.

  ‘I volunteer to fill in the grave,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to tire yourself doing it. I’ll also tell you all the information I know. Your Party’s policy is to punish those who run away and forgive those who return, so you have no right to kill me. No right! Please, I beg you, beg you!’

  Someone behind Kien touched his arm, whispering to him in a trembling voice. ‘Kien, why don’t we forgive them for now and send them to our superiors to decide?’

  Kien turned. It was Cu. Kien burned with anger and he let fly in fury, sticking his gun into Cu’s mouth. ‘If you want to show your love for them go stand in the line with them. I’ll kill you too! You too!’

  ‘Kien, Kien, what the hell makes you cry so loudly?’

  The truckdriver’s beefy hand pushed through the hammock onto Kien’s shoulder, shaking him awake.

  ‘Get up! Get ready! Quick!’

  Kien slowly opened his eyes. The dark rings under them revealed his deep exhaustion. The painful memory of the dream throbbed against his temples. After some minutes he got up, then slowly climbed down from the hammock and dropped from the back of the truck to the ground.

  Seeing how sluggishly Kien ate, the driver sighed and says, ‘It’s because you slept back there, with nearly fifty bodies. You’ll have had nightmares. Right?’

  ‘Yes. Unbelievably horrible. I’ve had nightmares since joining this team, but last night’s was the worst.’

  ‘No doubt,’ the driver said, waving his hand in a wide arc. ‘This is the Jungle of Screaming Souls. It looks empty and innocent, but in fact it’s crowded. There are so many ghosts and devils all over this battleground! I’ve been driving for this corpse-collecting team since early ’73 but I still can’t get used to the passengers who come out of their graves to talk to me. Not a night goes by without them waking me to have a chat. It terrifies me. All kinds of ghosts, new soldiers, old soldiers, soldiers from Division 10, Division 2, soldiers from the provincial armed forces, the Mobile Forces 320, Corps 559, sometimes women, and every now and again, some southern souls, from Saigon.’ The driver spoke as though it was common knowledge.

  ‘Met any old friends?’ asked Kien.

  ‘Sure! Even some from my own village. Blokes from my first unit. Once I met a cousin who died way back in sixty-five.’

  ‘Do you speak to them?’

  ‘Yes, but… well, differently. The way you speak in hell. There are no sounds, no words. It’s hard to describe. It’s like when you’re dreaming – you know what I mean.’

  ‘You can’t actually do anything to help each other?’ asked Kien. ‘Do you talk about interesting things?’

  ‘Not very. Just sad and pitiful things, really. Under the ground in the grave human beings aren’t the same. You can look at each other, understand each other, but you can’t do anything for each other.’

  ‘If we found a way to tell them news of a victory would they be happier?’ Kien asked.

  ‘Come on! Even if we could, what would be the point? People in hell don’t give a damn about wars. They don’t remember killing. Killing is a career for the living, not the dead.’

  ‘Still, wouldn’t peacetime be an ideal moment for the resurrection of all the dead?’

  ‘What? Peace? Damn it, peace is a tree that thrives only on the blood and bones of fallen comrades. The ones left behind in the Screaming Souls battlegrounds were the most honourable people. Without them there would be no peace,’ the driver replied.

  ‘That’s a rotten way to look at it. There are so many good people, so many yet to be born, so many survivors now trying to live decent lives. Otherwise it’s not been worth it. I mean, what’s peace for? Or what’s fighting for?’ Kien asked.

  ‘Okay, I’ll grant you we have to have hope. But we don’t even know if the next generation will get a chance to grow up, or if they do, how they’ll grow up. We do know that many good people have been killed. Those of us who survived have all been trying to make something of ourselves, but not succeeding.

  ‘But look at the chaotic post-war situation in the cities, with their black markets. Life is so frustrating, for all of us. And look at the bodies and the graves of our comrades! The ones who brought the peace. Shameful, my friend, shameful.’

  ‘But isn’t peace better than war?’

  The driver seemed astonished. ‘This kind of peace? In this kind of peace it seems people have unmasked themselves and revealed their true, horrible selves. So much blood, so many lives were sacrificed for what?’

  ‘Damn it, what are you trying to say?’ Kien asked.

  ‘I’m not trying to say anything. I’m simply a soldier like you who’ll now have to live with broken dreams and with pain. But, my friend, our era is finished. After this hard-won victory fighters like you, Kien, will never be normal again. You won’t even speak with your normal voice, in the normal way again.’

  ‘You’re so damn gloomy. What a doom-laden attitude!’

  ‘I am Tran Son, a soldier. That’s why I’m a bit of a philosopher. You never curse your luck? Never feel elated? What did the dead ones tell you in your dreams last night? Call that normal?’ he asked.

  On the way out the Zil truck moves in slow, jerky movements. The road is bumpy, muddy and potholed. Son stays in first gear, the engine revving loudly as if about to explode. Kien looks out of the window, trying to lighten his mood.

  The rain stops, but the air is dull, the sky lead-grey. Slowly they move away from the Screaming Souls Jungle and the whole forest area itself. Behind them the mountains, the streams, all drop away from view.

  But strangely, Kien now feels another presence, feels someone is watching him. Is the final scene, the unfinished, bloody dream of this morning, about to intrude itself in his mind. Will the pictures unfold against his wishes as he sits staring at the road?

  Kien called to Son over the roar of the engine, asking if he’ll be finished with MIA work after this tour of duty.

  ‘Not sure. There’s a lot of paperwork to do. What are your plans?’

  ‘First, finish school. That means evening classes. Then try the university entrance exams. Right now my only skills are firing sub-machine-guns and collecting bodies. What about you, will you keep driving?’

  The truck reached a drier section of road and Son was able to go up a gear, dropping the loud engine revs.

  ‘When we’re demobbed, I’ll stop driving. I’ll carry my guitar everywhere and be a singer. Sing and tell stories. “Gentlemen, brothers and sisters, please listen to my painful story, then I’ll sing you a horror song of our times.”’

  ‘Very funny,’ said Kien. ‘If you ask me we’d do better to tell them to forget about the war altogether.’

  ‘But how can we forget? We’ll never forget any of it, never. Admit it. Go on, admit it!’

  Sure, thinks Kien, it’s hard to forget. When will I calm down? When will my heart be free of the tight grip of war? Whether pleasant or ugly memories they are there to stay for ten, twenty years, perhaps for ever.

  From now on life may be always dark, full of suffering, with brief moments of happiness. Living somewhere between a dream world and reality, on the knife-edge between the two.

  I’ve lived all these lost years. No one to blame for that. Not me, not anyone else. All I know now is that I’m still alive after twenty-nine years and from now on I have to fend for myself.

  There’s a new life ahead of me, and a new era for Vietnam. I have to survive.

  But my soul is still in turmoil. The past years out here imprison me. My past seems to enfold me and move with me wherever I go. At night while I sleep I hear my steps from a distant peacetime echoing on the pavement. I just have to shut my eyes to conjure up those past times and completely wipe out the present.

  So many tragic memories, so much pain from long ago that I have told my
self to forget, yet it is that easy to return to them. My memories of war are always close by, easily provoked at random moments in these days which are little but a succession of boring, predictable, stultifying weeks.

  Not long ago, in a dream, I was back, standing in the Screaming Souls Jungle. The stream, the dirt road, the empty grass plots, the edge of the forest of days gone by, were sparkling in sunshine. I was standing in this peaceful, picturesque scene looking southwest towards the four olive-green peaks of Ngoc Bo Ray mountain, when my new dream adventure began.

  The whole night long I reviewed the life of my scout platoon. Each day, each memory, each person, appeared on a separate page of the dream. At last there was the scene by the stream where the whole scout platoon gathered around ‘Lofty’ Thinh’s grave, the afternoon before we left for a major battle in the Central Highlands.

  ‘Thinh, you stay here in the forest. We’re leaving to fight a battle,’ I heard my voice echoing from that afternoon. On behalf of the whole platoon I said farewell to Thinh’s soul.

  ‘From the depths of the earth, dear friend, please listen to your mates and give your blessing to us as we now must fight and break through the enemies’ lines. Please listen for the sounds of our guns. Your mates will shake sky and earth with the guns to avenge your death,’ the prayer concluded.

  Oh my lost years and months and days! My lost era! My lost generation!

  Another night with bitter tears wetting the pillow.

  Another night, also in a dream, I saw pretty Hoa in the Screaming Souls Jungle. She’d been born in Hai Hau in 1949, but killed a long way from home in 1968, when not even twenty. Hoa’s story was part of my mental war films, but somehow buried along with many others until now.

  We were only able to meet for a moment in my dream, a passing glance at each other. In the thick mist of the dream I could only see Hoa vaguely, far away. But I felt a passionate love and a grieving intimacy I’d not felt for her at the time of our traumatic, violent parting after Second Tet in 1968. During our brief time together I’d only felt a shameful impotence, a feeling of defeat and desperate exhaustion.