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

feeling of defeat and desperate exhaustion.
    For the entire night I floated in the sea of suffering called Mau Than, the tragic year of 1968. When I awoke it was almost dawn, yet the dream images were then transferred to my waking hours: Hoa fallen in a grassy clearing in the jungle, the American troops rushing towards her, then surrounding her, like bare-chested apes, puffing and panting, grabbing her, breathing heavily over her body. My throat still hurt from screaming during the nightmare, my lips were bleeding, the buttons of my pajama coat had been ripped off, my chest was deeply scratched, and my heart beat painfully, as though I were in danger, not our courageous Hoa.
    Since returning to Hanoi I've had to live with this parade of horrific memories, day after day, long night after long night. For how many years now?
    For how many more years?
    Often in the middle of a busy street, in broad daylight, I've suddenly become lost in a daydream. On smelling the stink of rotten meat I've suddenly imagined I was back crossing Hamburger Hill in 1972, walking over strewn corpses.The stench of death is often so overpowering I have to stop in the middle of the pavement, holding my nose, while starded, suspicious people step around me, avoiding my mad stare.
    In my bedroom, on many nights the helicopters attack overhead, the dreaded whump-whump-whump of their rotor blades bringing horror for us in the field. I curl up in defense against the expected vapor-streak and the howling of their rockets.
    But the whump-whump-whump continues without the attack, and the helicopter image dissolves, and I see in its place a ceiling fan. Whump-whump-whump.
    I am watching a U.S. war movie with scenes of American soldiers yelling as they launch themselves into combat on the TV screen, and once again I'm ready to jump in and mix it in the fiery scene of blood, mad killing, and brutality that warps soul and personality. The thirst for killing, the cruelty, the animal psychology, the evil desperation. I sit dizzied, shocked by the barbarous excitement of reliving close combat with bayonets and rifle butts. My heart beats rapidly as I stare at the dark corners of the room where ghost-soldiers emerge, shredded with gaping wounds.
    My life seems little different from that of a sampan pushed upstream towards the past. The future lied to us, there long ago in the past. There is no new life, no new era, nor is it hope for a beautiful future that now drives me on, but rather the opposite.The hope is contained in the beautiful prewar past.
    The tragedies of the war years have bequeathed to my soul the spiritual strength that allows me to escape the infinite present. The little trust and will to live that remains stems not from my illusions but from the power of my recall.
    Still, even in the midst of my reminiscences I can't avoid admitting there seems little left for me to hope for. From my life before soldiering there remains sadly little. That wonderful period has been heartlessly extinguished. The lucky star of fortune I once had seems also to be gone forever. It once shone brightly, but quickly burned out. The aura of hope in those early postwar days swiftly faded.
    Those who survived continue to live. But that will has gone, that burning will which was once Vietnam's salvation. Where is the reward of enlightenment due to us for attaining our sacred war goals? Our history-making efforts for the great generations have been to no avail. What's so different here and now from the vulgar and cruel life we all experienced during the war?
    Even me, I'm nearly forty. I was seventeen at the start of the war in 1965, twenty-seven at the fall of Saigon in 1975. So, how many long years have passed? Ten or eleven? Twelve? No. Thirteen? Another year with the MIA team. Or was it longer? And more time wandering as a veteran. Closer to fourteen years lost because of the war.
    And me already forty. An age I once thought distant, strange, somehow unattainable.
    From the