The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh Read Free Book Online Page A

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 submachine 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 forever.
    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-seven 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 myself 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 Jungle of Screaming Souls. The stream, the dirt road, the empty
    grass clearings, 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 us and give us your blessing, as we now must fight and break through the enemies' lines. Please listen for the sounds of our guns. Your friends 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