Viet Nam :: essays research papers

The media has made sure that all(a) of us are advised of the Vietnam conflict. Readers and movie goers the world over are now familiar with Americas distress in Vietnam and the problems American veterans have endured as they attempted to adjust to civilian life. Although all life is irreplaceable, the fact remains that the United States lost fewer than a million men in the Vietnam conflict and their social institutions and cornerstone remained relatively intact. The Vietnamese, however, lost two million men and their culture, society, landscape and usage were literally obliterated. Despite this destruction, their side of this horrendous story has seldom been told. worsened yet, when it is told, they are of x portrayed in the most unattractive of all light. Until only a few years ago, the Vietnamese were portrayed by the media as a faceless people with no identity entities not worth caring about. The turning point came with the publication, in Dutch, of Duong Thu Huongs Blind pro mised land in 1994. This landmark book was followed by Bao Ninhs The Sorrow of War. War novels deal, superficially, with strugglefare. only underneath all the blood and horror and carnage lie cold deeper social and human issues. The best novels of war, such as Erich Maria Remarques only Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingways For Whom the Bell Tolls, as hygienic as Bao Ninhs The Sorrow of War, also deal with the makeup and morality of a culture or a society gone wrong. The protagonist of these books, whether accepted or fictional, often endures a harrowing personal struggle by dint of both a public and private hell and usually undergoes almost sort of redemption, even if that redemption results in death. Born in 1952, Bao Ninh served in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade during the Vietnam conflict. Of the five hundred youths who went to war with this brigade in 1969, Bao Ninh was one of its ten survivors, so it is not uncommon that war should be the subject of his fi rst book, considering the impact it has had on his life. Semi-autobiographical in nature, the protagonist of The Sorrow of War, Kien, is the lone survivor of his brigade and a ten year veteran of the war. As the book opens he is serving as part of an MIA body collection team. It is through his memories that we slowly learn how the war has devastated his youth and the youth of his countrymen.