Comparing O Briens The Things They Carried and Ninhs...

Comparing O Briens The Things They Carried and Ninhs The Sorrow of War Bao Ninhs The Sorrow of War is a contrapuntal reading to American literature on the Vietnam War. But rather than stand in stark contrast to Tim O Briens The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War is strangely similar, yet different at the same time. From a post-colonialist standpoint, one must take in account both works to get an accurate image of the war. The Sorrow of War is an excellent counterpoint because it is truthful. Tim O Brien writes: . . . you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. (O Brien, 42) Bao Ninh succeeds in this respect. And it was for this reason that the Vietnamese†¦show more content†¦Not only were American soldiers well muscled and athletes, (191) but some of them were black. Whites were not particularly strange, as Vietnam had been under French rule, but blacks must have been something of a frightening, unfamiliar novelty. This too is reflected in the text. When Kien and Hoa encounter an Americ an platoon in the jungle, the blacks in the platoon are the first thing Kien describes, after describing what was not a man, but a tracker dog as big as a calf. (189) And when the soldiers smoke rosa canina, one of the things they hallucinate is groups of headless black American soldiers right along with hallucinations about fantastic creatures and extinct animal species. With these counterpoints to the American views of Vietnamese soldiers, an American certainly gets a different picture of the war. Bao Ninhs portrayal of postwar Vietnam also fosters a more objective viewpoint of the war. After the war, the Americans took their twisted memories back home, to an unscathed country where nearly everyone had something to go back to. For North Vietnamese soldiers, home was where the horror had been, and in many ways still was. He is plain in his message: The recent years of war had brought enough suffering and pain to last them a thousand years. (75) Kiens slow, painful demise is brought on by the heavy sorrow of war as he is haunted by an eternal past. (88) During the war North Vietnamese soldiers were but insects or an ant who