ve thread of The Sorrow of War must be pieced together from the episodic presentation of events. Kien is the only son of parents who separated because of politics after Dien Bien Phu. His mother styles herself a New Intellectual and enthusiastic Party member who, just before deserting the family, looks forward to her son's joining the Youth Union and becoming a brave man. His father, an artist and museum curator who drinks to excess because his painting is too bourgeois to suit the Party, descends into insanity, first painting only in yellow and eventually burning all of his paintings. Kien is called home from school at 17, just in time to hear his father's final ambiguous (actually quite sane and ironic) words:
New times are coming, splendid and magnificent and trouble-free times. No more sadness. . . there will still be great sorrow, sorrow passed down to you. I leave you nothing but that sorrow (Ninh 126).
Soon after his father's death, occurring the first day the US bombs Hanoi in 1965, Kien joins the army. His plan in general is to marry Phuong, the girl next door. Several months later, on the train to join his regiment at the front in the south, he meets Phuong by chance, now a university student who is willing to do her bit for the war effort. On impulse she decides to hitchhike with him and say good-bye, then ride back north to school. On the way, a freight train they are riding in is bombed, and Kien is knocked unconscious. At the site of the wreck, some sailors grab Phuong and gang-rape her; she is virginal. Kien wakes after the event and finds her, then kills a sailor who comes back for more. Kien leads a deeply traumatized Phuong to shelter in a bombed-out school to rest, but he wakes to find her gone. A group of NVA officers there lewdly explain that she has gone off, voluntarily, with some other soldiers: She has become a whore whom he cannot forgive, even though she was brutalized. Torn between hatred and despair, ...