The media ensured that we were all aware of the Vietnam conflict. Readers and movie fans around the world now know about America's suffering in Vietnam and the problems American veterans endured as they tried to adjust to civilian life. Even if all life is irreplaceable, the fact remains that the United States lost less than a million men. in the Vietnamese conflict and their social institutions and infrastructure remained relatively intact. The Vietnamese, however, lost two million men and their culture, society, landscape and traditions were literally wiped out. Despite this destruction, their version of this horrific story has rarely been told. Worse yet, when it is told, they are often portrayed in the most unattractive light of all. A few years ago, the media presented the Vietnamese as a people without a face and without an identity; entities that aren't worth worrying about. The turning point came with the publication, in Dutch, of Blind Paradise by Duong Thu Huong in 1994. This historic book was followed by The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh. War novels deal, superficially, with war. But behind all the blood, horror and carnage lie much deeper social and human problems. The best war novels, such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War, also deal with the composition and morality of a culture or society that has disappeared. fake. The protagonist of these books, whether real or fictional, often endures a harrowing personal struggle through a public and private hell and usually undergoes some sort of redemption, even if that redemption results in death. Born in 1952, Bao Ninh served in the Glorieux. 27th Youth Brigade during the Vietnam conflict. Among the five hundred young people who fought with this brigade in 1969, Bao Ninh was one of its ten survivors. It is therefore not unusual that the war was the subject of his first book, given the impact it had on his life. Semi-autobiographical in nature, The Sorrow of War's protagonist, Kien, is the sole survivor of his brigade and a ten-year veteran of the war. When the book opens, he is part of an MIA body collection team. It is through his memories that we gradually learn how the war devastated his youth and that of his compatriots...