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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Sorrow of War, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, Trauma, and Moving On
Love in Times of Hardship
Coping Through Writing
Patriotism, Sacrifice, and Skepticism
Summary
Analysis
Not all of Kien’s memories of the Vietnam War are harrowing. He remembers, for instance, the period in which he and his fellow soldiers posted up near the Jungle of Screaming Souls for “political indoctrination.” They spent their days hearing about politics as their superiors spoke rapturously about the Northern forces, insisting that they would triumph. But there was still quite a bit of time to take it easy, so Kien and his friends would play cards and smoke rosa canina roots. It was the rainy season, and there wasn’t much fighting going on. Kien had plenty of friends to play cards with—but soon enough, the war took them all.
Something that makes moving on from difficult experiences particularly hard is that those experiences can still be associated with positive memories. Even the worst period of a person’s life can still have some good moments. For instance, Kien fondly remembers playing cards with his friends when they weren’t in combat. If it were even possible to completely forget about the war, then, he might not actually want to, because that would mean letting go of his fond memories of the time, too.
Themes
Eventually, Kien’s entire platoon was down to just four soldiers: Tu, Thanh, Van, and Kien himself. They were playing cards the morning of the North’s first true attack on the city of Saigon. Knowing he and his friends would soon be in combat, he told the others to play cards slowly. If they left the game unfinished, he said, perhaps heaven would keep them alive to let them finish. But Thanh mocked this idea, saying that it didn’t work that way: if they didn’t finish, God would simply take them all from the world—that way, they’d be able to finish the game in heaven.
Again, the novel suggests that superstition is a way of coping with fear and trauma. In this case, Kien tries to manufacture a sense of hope before going into battle, insisting that they should save the game for later so that they have a reason to survive—or, more accurately, a reason to be spared by God. In the face of the terrifying reality of war, then, Kien grasps for any means of feeling in control of his own destiny.
Themes
Kien’s last card game with his fellow soldiers took place on April 29. Early the next morning, only Kien and Tu were left. They had reached the airport in Saigon and were about to overtake it. Sensing that he would surely die in this battle, Tu gave Kien the deck of cards and told him that many of the cards themselves carried “the sacred spirit” of their entire platoon. And just as he predicted, Tu died fighting in the airport that morning, a mere three hours before the end of the war.
For Kien, one of the many challenges of surviving the Vietnam War is the fact that he had to watch so many of his friends die. Right up until the very end of the war, everyone was in danger of losing their lives—including Kien. He, however, managed to make it through the war’s final fight, which took place at the airport in Saigon on April 30, 1975. But just because he survived doesn’t mean he can simply return to a normal life, since he has now experienced so much loss.
Themes
Swinging in a hammock after having finally reached the Jungle of Screaming Souls with the Remains-Gathering Team, Kien falls through memory after memory of the war. The hammock has been hung over a pile of corpses they’ve already found, and Kien wonders if they’re the ones he hears calling out in the night. He feels mystified by how different everything feels in this jungle, even though he was here just one year ago. He realizes that the difference doesn’t have to do with the landscape or anything specific about the area. Rather, the difference is that the last time he was here there was a war raging on, and now there’s peace.
As a member of the Remains-Gathering Team, Kien has basically no chance of forgetting about his harrowing experiences in the war—after all, his job is literally to dig up soldiers who have gone missing in action, which is like excavating the horrors of his own wartime past. Instead of moving on in the aftermath of the war, then, he finds himself doing the opposite, effectively revisiting the traumatic experience as soon as it’s over.
Themes
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Remembering the first time he and his fellow soldiers came to the Jungle of Screaming Souls, Kien thinks about what it was like to smoke rosa canina. The locals have always said that the flower grows in graveyards and other places where there’s the “scent of death.” But Kien’s platoon decided to dry the roots and mix them in with tobacco. It had a sedating, slightly hallucinogenic effect that helped the soldiers relax. When they were smoking rosa canina, it was as if they could escape the turmoil of war and the constant threat of death. Kien always had vivid dreams when he smoked the flower’s root, once seeing Phuong—the love of his life—standing in a light Hanoi wind.
Kien’s memories about the war are wrapped up in not just the horrific things he saw, but also the moments of relative calm—moments that were clearly hard to come by, since Kien and his men had to smoke a hallucinogenic root in order to relax. Still, in these moments of peace, Kien’s mind drifted to Phuong, the woman he loved, ultimately hinting at the novel’s later suggestion that it’s possible for the mere idea of romance to emotionally sustain people in trying circumstances.
Themes
Soon, though, the higher-ups banned the smoking of rosa canina, ordering the soldiers to go through the jungle and rip up the plants so that they wouldn’t grow ever again. Still, the flower had already impacted the platoon, giving the men vivid hallucinations of headless American soldiers walking through the jungle and other frightening images. The soldiers put up small alters in their tents, honoring the soldiers who had died in the jungle.
Smoking the hallucinogenic rosa canina root seems to have added to the ominous, ghostly feelings that Kien and the other soldiers experienced while stationed in the Jungle of Screaming Souls. Although the root helped them relax, it also exacerbated their fears about American soldiers. And yet, while it might be the case that the root’s hallucinogenic properties worked against the soldiers by giving them vivid visions, it’s worth noting that it was completely rational for them to fear not just the American soldiers lurking in the jungle, but also the threat of violence and bodily harm that these soldiers represented. In a way, then, rosa canina wasn’t responsible for the soldiers’ terrifying thoughts: the war itself was.
Themes
Thinking back, Kien remembers his friend Can, whom he spoke with by a river one day in 1974. Kien was fishing and thinking about a battle that took place the previous week against Saigon commandos. In that fight, Kien had practically laughed in the face of death: as soldiers on both sides ran for cover, he brazenly walked out in the open and made his way slowly toward the enemy. Bullets fell around him, but he was never hit. When he reached one of the shooters, he gave the man a chance to collect himself, as if wanting to let him calmly reload his gun and kill him. But the Southern soldier lost his calm and fumbled, so Kien begrudgingly shot him dead. When he moved on, the other Southern soldiers fled.
There’s a sad kind of irony at play here. Kien and his fellow soldiers have spent the entire war trying not to get killed, and yet Kien has seen so many of his friends die in battle. Now, though, Kien seems to actively invite death by behaving so fearlessly and foolishly, but instead of dying, he ends up succeeding in battle. It’s as if things always transpire against him in the war, no matter what he wants. The entire episode is also a good illustration of the extent to which wartime trauma can drive people to stop caring about their own lives.
Themes
Kien saw his behavior as foolish, but the higher-ups honored him by inviting him to a “long-term training course” near Hanoi. The idea, his superiors told him, was to preserve the best soldiers for future fights. By the time Kien finished the training, his superior said, everyone in his platoon would surely be dead.
Kien’s skepticism about military life begins to creep into the novel, as he recognizes that his superiors praise him for behavior he considers foolish. He doesn’t see his decision to walk straight into enemy fire as a sign of patriotic bravery—he sees it as an indication that he has very little regard for his own life. Plus, the idea of training for future fights is surely unappealing to Kien, who is eager to finish his time in the Vietnam War and return to civilian life.
Themes
There was a time when Kien would have felt honored by the opportunity to attend the training and avoid the frontlines. But as he fished in the river on that day in 1974, he felt nothing like pride. When Can approached him, though, he congratulated Kien on the honor. As they talked, Kien realized that Can was unraveling—he couldn’t go on with this war, he said. The constant killing was simply too much. He used to desperately try to avoid bayoneting fallen enemies or bashing in their heads, but now he didn’t even think twice about it. The entire experience of war was eating away at him.
The fact that Kien would have been proud of himself at the beginning of the war for earning praise from his superiors ultimately highlights just how much war can change a person’s outlook. As a young soldier, Kien would have been honored to receive special training. By the end of the war, though, he’s highly skeptical of such things, perhaps because he feels that it’s impossible to be truly honorable in the twisted and bloody context of war—a feeling that Can seems to experience on an even greater level, as he feels fundamentally corrupted by the things he has seen and done.
Themes
Kien told Can not to complain so much. He had no choice, after all, but to go on fighting. Still, Can talked about how his mother was sick and alone at home. He wished he never even agreed to go to war in the first place—he technically could have avoided it with the excuse of needing to care for his mother, but he didn’t end up pressing the matter. Now, though, he wondered what it was all for. He admitted to Kien that he was going to desert the army, and though Kien tried to dissuade him by pointing out that he’d surely die on his own or be dragged back only to be executed, nothing he said could dissuade the young man.
Can’s desire to run away underscores just how miserable he is as a soldier in the North Vietnamese Army. To desert the army was a very serious thing to do and was punishable by death, so it’s clear that Can is desperate to escape the life of a soldier. Kien most likely understands this sense of desperation, but he doesn’t see the point of deserting the army, since doing so would be futile and end in death—either way, then, these soldiers face the constant threat of death.
Themes
Can pointed out that he wouldn’t get caught if Kien didn’t order the soldiers to go looking for him. After asking Kien to come visit him after the war, he slipped into the woods. Kien didn’t report the conversation, but his superiors soon found out about Can’s disappearance and ordered everyone to look for him. They eventually found him only a few hours away—nowhere near home. But they didn’t bring him back to fight, since he was already dead. Nobody knew how he died, but they didn’t dwell on the matter. Everyone forgot about him—everyone, that is, except Kien, who was haunted by Can’s image every night. Long after Can’s death, Kien thought about how he died disgraced and misunderstood by everyone around him, including by Kien himself.
Kien’s response to Can’s death is directly tied to the fact that Can confided in him before deserting the army. This suggests that Can saw him as a kindred soul, or someone who would understand his desperation to get away from the horrors of war. Can wasn’t necessarily wrong to think Kien might feel the same way as him, considering Kien’s skepticism about the war after having witnessed so much terrible violence. However, Kien didn’t offer Can any sort of emotional support, which is why he now looks back with a sense of regret when he thinks of Can, realizing that he stubbornly refused to relate to Can’s feelings about the war—perhaps because doing so would have made it impossible for Kien himself to continue as a soldier.
Themes
As Kien lies in his hammock and listens to the ghostly sounds coming from the Jungle of Screaming Souls, he’s certain Can is yelling out to him. The memories of his own fighting days flash before his eyes even as he drifts to sleep, but then he wakes with a start in the hours just before dawn. He has just heard a chilling cry coming from the jungle—a cry he has heard before. He heard it for the first time in this exact spot one year earlier, in the last year of the war. Although the cry sounds ghostly, he knows from his experience last year that it is actually the sound of “love’s lament.”
When Kien tries to sleep in the Jungle of Screaming Souls while working with the Remains-Gathering Team, the sounds of the jungle bring back more than one memory. He thinks he hears Can crying out to him, but he also hears a sound that reminds him of something else—of “love’s lament.” It’s not yet clear what, exactly, this means, but it's evident that this area brings back many different kinds of memories for Kien and that not all of them are directly related to battle or the army.
Themes
