4 ideas
An air raid scatters them. While Kiên is separated, Phương is sexually assaulted, and the idealism both carried out of Hanoi is broken before he fires a shot. Their love never recovers, and Kiên spends ten years of combat and the years after it circling back to that one episode.
The novel is written from the winning side, yet it holds that military victory gives the survivors no meaning or relief. Of Kiên's original unit of about five hundred, only a handful live. The veterans come home believing the best men died first, and that peace was bought by those who can no longer enjoy it. Winning and suffering are therefore separate ledgers, and a triumphant outcome does not settle the private cost.
Kiên's memories arrive out of order, looping and colliding rather than following the calendar. A second narrator finds his manuscript with its pages unsorted and cannot put them in order. The form argues that traumatic memory is organized by emotional gravity, not sequence. A linear, orderly war narrative is therefore a kind of falsification imposed after the fact.
After the war, Kiên serves on a team collecting the remains of the dead, including from a place soldiers call the Jungle of Screaming Souls. The physical task of digging up and identifying bodies mirrors his compulsive excavation of his own past. For the survivor, the war does not end at the armistice. It becomes an unending labor of retrieval that he performs, and later writes, because he cannot leave the dead unburied.