The Sorrow of War (6 page)

"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 slowjerky move-ments.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'd 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 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 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 horizon of the distant past an immense sad wind, like an endless sorrow, gusts and blows through the cities, through the villages, and through my life.

Kien lays his pen down. He turns off the table lamp, pushes his chair away, stands up and silently walks to the window. It is very cold in the room, yet he feels hot and breathless. He is uneasy, as though he feels a violent summer thunderstorm approaching, heralded by gusts of alternately hot and cold air.

So bitter is his frustration that he feels his pen takes him closer to at first and then more distant from what he wishes to say.

Every evening, before sitting at his desk and opening his manuscript, he tries to generate the appropriate atmosphere, the right feelings. He tries to separate each problem, the problem of paragraphs and pages, wishing to finish them in a specific way and by a specific time. He plans the sequences in his mind. What his heroes will do and what they will say in particular circumstances. How they'll meet, how they'll part. He lays the design of this out in his mind before taking up his pen.

But the act of writing blurs his neat designs, finally washing them away altogether, or blurs them so the lines become intermixed and sequences lose their order.

Upon rereading the manuscript he is astounded, then terrified, to read that his hero from a previous page has, on this page, disintegrated. Worse, that his heroes are inconsistent and contradictory and make him uneasy. The more uneasy he feels the quicker the task at hand slides from his mind.

On some nights, he energetically follows a certain line, pursuing it sentence by sentence, page by page, building it into a substantial work. He wrestles with it, becomes consumed by it, then in a flash sees it is all irrelevant. Standing back from it he then sees no value in the frantic work, for the story-line stands beyond that circled arena of his soul, that little secret area which we all know intuitively contains our spiritual reserves.

Kien seems to write only to rid himself of his devils. Neither the torment of regret brought on by wasted writing efforts nor the loss of his health can overcome his urgent desire to be a perfectionist. The threat of being pinned to his writing-desk for great lengths of time similarly does not concern him. He continues his quest for perfection, crossing out, erasing, crossing out again, editing, tearing up some pages, then tearing up and destroying all. Then he starts over again, making out each syllable like a learner trying to spell a new word.

Even so, he still believes in his writing and his talent. It is something else that needs to be addressed, something intangible, other than the writing. So, he begins again, writing and waiting, writing and waiting, sometimes nervous, overexcited.

He seems to mature as he works, and grows more confident from this belief, and pushes on with new confidence, despite all the past failures, patiently savoring the end-result he anticipates from his artistic endeavor and creativity.

Despite this growing confidence, he frequently relapses and once again feels like a man standing on the edge of an abyss.

Despite his conviction, his dedication, he also sometimes suspects his recall of certain events. Is there a force at work within him that creates this suspicion?

He dares not abandon himself to emotions, yet in each chapter Kien writes of the war in a deeply personal way, as though it had been his very own war. And so on and on, frantically writing, Kien refights all his battles, relives the times where his life was bitter, lonely, surreal, and full of obstacles and horrendous mistakes. There is a force at work in him that he cannot resist, as though it opposes every orthodox attitude taught him and it is now his task to expose the realities of war and to tear aside conventional images.

It is a dangerous spin he is in, flying off at a tangent, away from the traditional descriptive writing styles, where everything is orderly. Kien's heroes are not the usual predictable, stiff figures but real people whose lives take diverse and unexpected directions.

After all his trial essays, short stories, and novellas comes this novel, which he suddenly realizes is his last adventure as a soldier. Curious, for it is at the same time his most serious challenge in life; in writing this work he has driven himself to the brink of insanity. There is no escape, no savior to help him. He alone must meet this writing challenge, his last duty as a soldier.

In contemplation an odd idea takes root in his mind— or has it been there for many years? At the bottom of his heart he believes he exists on this earth to perform some unnamed heavenly duty. A task that is sacred and noble, but secret. He begins to believe that it is because of this