Introduction
The book The Sorrow of War by B. Ninh depicts a unique experience of Vietnam solder who fights for freedom and unity of his country. The book portrays emotions and sufferings of the main character, his understanding and perception of war. Ninh depicts the war as formless which did not have its own distinctive contours, although those contours became visible only in retrospect. The Vietnam War was perceived as injustice because of the discrepancy between the loose form it took and the form the soldiers had been trained to identify and label as such. This unfamiliar form involved two sorts of combat engagements, the fire-fight and the search and destroy mission, neither of which conformed to battle scenarios. Kien’s experience shows that war is useless and painful, fearful and unjust, but it the war against foreign invasion and for unity of the country.
Main body
From Kien’s experience readers understand that war is painful and fearful, with no rules and principles. Kein underlines that it did not take long for the soldiers to realize that the firefights were not at all analogous to the heroic charges and decisive confrontations of their fathers’ war. In fact, it quickly became evident that the fire-fight did npt result in any discernible difference beyond the casualties produced. Given the shapelessness of the war experience, its moral, tactical, and technological amorphousness, we would expect meanings constructed in an orderly environment to lose plausibility rapidly. Indeed, this is precisely what we have witnessed as we have followed the soldiers into the vastly altered social surround of the war zone. War, offering comparisons that bring into bold relief how traditional military tactics serve, among other aims, as part of the plausibility structure that maintains a soldier’s world view. Language, as an index of cultural reality, reflects this new uncertainty. In this situation, one’s knowledge is no longer trustworthy, because appearances may belie the underlying reality. Reality therefore becomes problematic and potentially deceptive. It is a cry of bewilderment in the face of evaporating forms through which to interpret experience. “the path of war seems endless, desperate and leading nowhere” (Ninh 15). The enemy’s effectiveness had little to do with any purely material military advantage. Undeniably, the training, equipment, support, and manpower of the North Vietnam forces in Indochina were substantially weaker to the USA forces. What the Vietnamese nationalists, in their latest incarnation as the Vietcong, did possess was extensive experience in fighting a type of war where stealth, evasion, elusiveness, and the element of surprise counted more heavily than did conventional indices of military might.
Search and destroy was the product of the same military mentality associated with the destruction of Hiroshima. However, in Vietnam it was wretched excessiveness on a regular basis. North Vietnam was being hit each month with an explosive force equal to two atomic bombs. Kein depicts: “We have so many of those damned idiots up there in the North enjoying the profits of war” (Ninh 21). Kein describes that dying in the formless war was stripped of the meanings which traditionally adhere to sacrifice during times of national emergency. Because the war was perceived as “senseless” and absurd,” serving no discernible purpose and benefiting no human community, death in it was a purely physical event, bereft of larger import. Ethical considerations aside, the immediate consequence of such blind destructive capacity was to make the environment appear completely lethal. It often seemed as if all the forces of man and nature had conspired to take the life. Under such conditions, death loses its culturally derived meaning as an ultimate event and particularly its military connotation as sacrifice in the line of duty. Rather, death is viewed simply as the cessation of biological viability, the result of mishap. Language provides the fundamental assortment of categories under which to subsume experience. Through language, and especially “conversation”, feeling occurs and reality is constructed and construed. This process is true of all the other social institutions which carry the task forward at different levels of abstraction. All cooperate in the cause of ordering.
What emerges from an examination of the Kein’s narrative account is a world in which this fundamental human need is frustrated. The presence of the invisible enemy forced soldiers to maintain an excruciating level of awareness.. This tactic, essential for successful insurgency, made the Vietnam War insufferable to the Americans. The Vietcong, identical in appearance and language to the “friendly” Vietnamese for whom the Americans were presumably fighting and dying, managed to become firmly ensconced among the indigenous population in the South. The invisible enemy posed a constant threat to life and limb (and meaning). The contours of reality become especially vague when even the fundamental distinction between civilian and soldier cannot be confidently made. The feelings were deep and painful: “the souls of the beloved dead silently and gloomy dragged the sorrow of warinto his life” (Ninh 25). The enemy in Vietnam wore no uniforms, nor did it abide by the rules of engagement of conventional wars in which there are designated nonbelligerents. This assessment was as true of aggregates as it was of individuals. The hamlet, as the basic unit of Vietnamese society, was often as tightly knit a social institution as the family in Western cultures, demonstrating the same commonality of purpose. Thus, a whole village could be destroyed by one bomb. Americans, expecting to be met with cheering and kisses as a result of their initiation, might instead be greeted with a deadly hail of small arms fire. “But war was a world with no home, no roof, no comfort, … a miserable journey of endless drifting” (Ninh 31). The one certainty in Vietnam was uncertainty: it was impossible to know which response they would receive until they actually entered the village.
Kein’s experience demonstrates that the brutality was exacerbated by the unusual political and geographic characteristics of the conflict in Southeast Asia. The picture that emerges from the accounts is one of awesome and relentless blood-letting in which no one is spared. Such a situation, which we have designated “the barbarian loosed,” demands elucidation. The most obvious explanation for the occurrence of atrocities is the reliance on the body count as the sole measure of military effectiveness. Simply put, the policy of equating a high body count with military success spawned a situation wherein atrocity was prescribed and rewarded. The military manipulated the definition of victory to generate new meanings bearing no relation to previously stipulated ones. The narrators illuminate the world view of the American grunt by identifying and elaborating on the social processes which make possible such behavior. In effect, they describe an environment in which the usual forms of social control have been swept aside. If one executed that command in the correct direction with appropriate determination, then progress could be gauged in statute miles. “Horrible, poisonous nightmares brought back images that had haunted him constantly throughout the war” (Ninh 79). War, in this conception, is a relatively manageable affair of front lines, rear areas, hostile armies, and demarcated campaigns. It is war with plot, plan, and pattern. Yet soldiers, like all humans, strive to make sense of their experience in accord with the felt needs of their situation. The most basic of those needs is a body of taken-for-granted knowledge that is confirmed by ongoing social activity.
Thus the Vietnamese people prepared by a lifetime of cultural indoctrination to fight a conventional war, found himself in a formless war chasing an invisible enemy. In this situation, the meanings traditionally attached to war–heroism, nobility, sacrifice, victory, duty and honor. The underlying assumption is that war is inescapably unjust, deriving its meaning from its outcome. “War has robbed me of the liberty I Deserves” (Ninh 79). The war took the form of an immediately recognizable strategy which was relatively simple to implement: push the enemy back to his point of origin, capture that point of origin, declare yourself triumphant. In its fundamentals.
In sum, there are a number of salient features in these two descriptions. The most significant is that the war was perceived as formless, without order and purpose, obeying none of the dictates of war logic that a generation of Americans had come to accept as proper and fitting. Rather, the Vietnam War was conducted against native people and foreigners. The perceptions of the Vietnam War as a separate universe in which the forms of everyday reality are absent are neatly captured in emotions and feelings.
Works Cited
Ninh, B. The Sorrow of War. Riverhead Trade, 1998.