Bao Ninh - The Sorrow of War

She gently lifted his face, softly kissing his eyelids, then his lips, then again buried his face into her breasts. ’I love you. I’ve loved you since we were children. I’ve loved your mother and your father, as I would have if I’d been your sister, or brother. From now on I’ll be your wife. I’ll go with you. I’ll see you to the gate of the battlefront, just to see what it’s like. I’ll stay until we’re forced to part. That moment will be with us very soon.

‘But for tonight, be with me. We’re here together, alone. It’s here your heroic journey to the front starts. Don’t be scared, of me or of anything else. From now on I’ll be a lover and a wife to you; I’ll never be angry at you and remember I’m not taking leave of my senses. Not yet.’

Kien trembled. The fresh cool air chilled a film of sweat on his forehead and over his back. He was both frozen with fear and brimming with love for her. He took hold of her waist, but felt weak and confused.

He couldn’t. He dared not.

Phuong lay down before him gently, pulling him over to her. He placed his head inside her arm, as a little boy would. She sighed, not in anger, but in resignation. She comforted him with soft words about his father, about his paintings, about herself, and about them, words about anything and nothing, and he fell into a reverie, looking at the dark moon through a curtain of beautiful long hair which almost covered his face.

As she talked on so softly he fell into a peaceful, warm dreamlike state, and he began unbuttoning her blouse, uncovering her beautiful pale breasts which rose between his eyes and the dark sky. He moved gently and began suckling her, softly at first, then with a strong passion, holding her breasts between both hands and tasting her, young and sweet.

But he dared not accept her challenge to make love to her.

The next day, they were back in class. Their last class. Then the tenth-formers, including Phuong, were allowed to go home early to prepare for their university entrance exams.

All except Kien, who got orders to report immediately to the army recruiting office. His time had come.

Kien remembers that distant night by the lake as though it were yesterday, despite the many intervening years. He needs only a little help from a dark moon and a balmy West Lake breeze and his imagination stirs. At the front, among the dead and surrounded by suffering, he often dreamed of and really felt her warm flesh again and tasted her virgin milk; in his dreams it was that which had given him the magical vitality to become the strongest, the luckiest, the greatest survivor of the war.

The dreams that brought her back to him were all at night. By day, strangely, Kien actually thought little of Phuong and missed her hardly at all. Certainly not as much as he missed her in later years, after she had left him for the second time. His soldier’s self-defence mechanisms were working well for him in those days, especially when he was in the Central Highlands.

Perhaps that’s why he developed such a fervent and disciplined attitude towards sleep. Once he was asleep, nothing could disturb him. In sleep you slept. In battle you fought. When planning you planned, thinking of what was behind as well as ahead of you, waiting at the next turn or on the other side of the pass.

By day, for some, old memories did return and persist, but only for those who were wounded, or exhausted, or in a permanently wretched condition or starving, and it usually meant one was facing further decline. In normal situations, one could keep them at bay.

Kien recalled just three occasions in ten years where he acutely missed Phuong during daylight hours, and he was haunted by those memories.

The first time was when he had been struck down by malaria in a march across Laos. Fever had gripped him for weeks and he had thought of her in his feverish state, half-imagining she was there.

The second time was when he lay wounded at Clinic 8, his regiment’s code name for a divisional hospital across the border in the safety of Cambodia. His wounds stank and he had flitted between dream and reality, awaiting death yet hanging on to his flickering life. Some features of his nurse resembled Phuong’s and every now and then when she passed he would fall to thinking of Phuong, the intensity of his emotions ebbing and flowing like a fever.

The third time was when he was with his scout platoon on what was officially called ‘State Farm Number 3’, the regiment’s headquarters. The scout platoon was idle; they were on the perimeter of the Screaming Souls Jungle, playing cards and getting high by sipping tea made from rosa canina , when he heard news of the three jungle girls from his scouts, who had been the girls’ lovers.

The three farm girls had disappeared on the other side of the mountain. He then dreamed of Phuong, every night, throughout this tragic episode. He had conveniently ignored the wild, romantic escapades of the three girls with their three lovers from his platoon because they reminded him of his romance with Phuong. Every night they had slipped out of their huts and into the jungle, secretly crossing streams and creeping along jungle paths to get to their girlfriends in their little house by the stream at the foot of the mountain. Kien lived their loves with them by proxy, using Phuong as his own jungle girl, conjuring up intense and passionately romantic dreams. Sadly, the dreams were often tinged with painful forebodings of disaster, as his romance with Phuong had been.

When they had captured the three commandos who had murdered the three girls he had decided to deal with them severely, meting out terrible deaths. Just before their executions he had forced them to dig their own graves and look at the pit where their bodies would end life on this earth. But at the last moment, as he was about to press the trigger, with the gun aimed directly at them, he gave them a reprieve.

It was not because of their pleading, nor because of prompting from his colleagues. No, it was because Phuong’s words had come to him like an inner voice: ‘So, you’ll kill lots of men? That’ll make you a hero, I suppose?’

It was unbelievable. He had let them live. It was uncanny and uncharacteristic of him, but that’s how it had ended. Absurd.

When he had been at Clinic 8, the second time he had thought of her, he had been seriously wounded. He had been delirious, thinking Phuong had actually come to him, not in a dream but in reality.

It was at the start of the 1965 rainy season, after his Battalion 27 had been surrounded and almost totally wiped out by the Americans. Kien had crawled almost one day and a night, dragging himself through mud on the forest floor, his naked body badly cut up. Mates who had escaped from the massacre met up with him on the edge of the forest and carried him west, to the border. He came to at Clinic 8, safely close to the Cambodian border.

Clinic 8 consisted of a dishevelled medical team, ragged and beaten to threads after months of treating the wounded, after incessant withdrawals by men who had been continually surrounded then bombed and shelled by artillery. Doctors, nurses and wounded soldiers, carrying one another on stretchers or on their backs, withdrew from the conflict under the protection of the bamboo canopies to the safety of their camp on the Cambodian border.

Just exactly where Clinic 8 was and the general situation with the staff or even what they looked like, Kien never discovered. In the two months he had been there, before being transferred to Hospital 214, he had lain buried in a flat-roofed trench, from which water had gushed on both sides. He had a horrible wound between his legs and another on his shoulder. His rotting flesh stank so strongly that even the mosquitoes avoided it. He seemed permanently comatose and the few times he came to his senses only reconfirmed his certainty that he would surely die when he next lost consciousness.