The Vietnam War. A soldier on the side of the Viet Cong, on the side of a different history, on the side of his memories. A story nameless only because its had so many names. ( )

Quan, who enlists to fight for his country as an idealistic 18-year-old, has now fought for North Vietnam for a decade. Those ten years have taught him, if nothing else, the costs of idealism. Even as he tries to balance his patriotism with his cynicism, Quan turns to old memories for solace. Given the chance to return home, he seizes on the chance to make the physically and psychologically demanding journey. That journey forces him to confront his past, among other things: his father, his childhood sweetheart, his boyhood friends now maimed or dead, and ultimately to recognize that his innocence and his idealism came at an enormous price. How should he handle his disillusionment with the Communist Party? A quiet, emotionally charged book, this often reads like the stories of an old man looking back on his life. That it is, instead, the reflections of a 28-year-old veteran, told mostly through a series of vignettes, illustrates the power of the book. Indeed, the collection of loosely connected “stories” really can be seen as almost a mythic quest by a hero toward (self-)knowledge. ( )

To understand Duong Thu Huong's novels, it is important to understand her background. At the age of twenty, Duong left college and volunteered to lead a Communist Youth Brigade to the front in the "War Against the Americans." She served in one of the most bombed regions of the war and was one of three survivors out of her group of twenty. She was also at the front during the 1979 Chinese attack on Vietnam. But during the 1980s, she became a critic of the Communist regime and an advocate for human rights. She was expelled from the party in 1989, imprisoned briefly in 1991 (the year she published this novel), and had her passport revoked so she could not leave the country. Her books were extremely popular prior to her imprisonment, but they are now banned and everything she has written since then has had to be published abroad, despite being written for a Vietnamese audience.

Novel Without a Name is the story of Quan, a young Communist soldier who, when the story opens, has been fighting the Americans for ten years. He left his village at the age of eighteen, excited for glory and idealistic about his nation's role in history. But after ten years of hunger, disease, and killing, "there is this gangrene that eats at the heart." He is summoned to company headquarters by a former classmate, who tells him that their friend has been imprisoned in a camp for psychiatric cases, and can he go and see what might be done for him. Afterward he is given leave to visit their hometown for a couple of days. But his brief visit is not a return to his dreamed of childhood, it is the source of more disillusionment.

Never. We never forget anything, never lose anything, never exchange anything, never undo what has been. There is no way back to the source, to the place where the pure, clear water once gushed forth.

Quan's idealism may be in tatters, but the war goes on. He returns to the front and further horrific warfare, corruption, and spiritual decay.

Duong has said that she never intended to become a writer. She served as an exemplary soldier, hoarding her impressions, and began to write as an expression of her pain. That pain is clearly reflected in Quan's odyssey between war and home and back again. ( )

Lovesick doves cooed all day in the bamboo. Grasshoppers flew in the grass on the edge of the dikes. Women laughed, teasing and chasing one another, rolling in the rice fields. They made us laugh...There was once a kite that dipped and swayed in the blue of the sky, our dreams reeling in the same space...And there is the earth, this mud where the flesh rots, where eyes decompose. These arms, these legs that crunch in the jaws of the boars. The souls ulcerated and foul from killing, the bodies so starved for tenderness that they haunt stables in search of pleasure. There is this gangrene that eats at the heart...

This is the first book I've read that is wholly concerned with the Vietnam War. It was likely simple procrastination that birthed the mission to have my first literature experience set in complete opposition to the mythos of the US, the endless me me me of protests and veterans and yet another tale of isolated invaders making a far away country their Agent Orange playground of honored atrocity. People suffered, yes, people died, yes, but these people could escape. Those who feel I'm belittling, look at the wealth of white-gaze narratives and monuments and politics on one end. Then make your way over.

Orangutans are almost human. There's no tastier flesh.

One, the author was a Việt cộng, before whom the United States fell to its knees. Two, the author is a woman, one of three survivors of forty after setting off at twenty years of age, and the first scene is of female bodies with the remains of breasts and genitals strewn around their worm-ridden corpses. Three, none of this matters, but such a rare perspective does deserve our full attention.

It's like dreaming. That's what it's like when you plunge into a forest. You can call and scream all you like; no one can hear you.

Bear in mind that this is the story of a winner. Bear in mind at all times that this is the story of a soldier whose hope has bred with their despair for far too long. Always remember that this is just one of the usual youths plumped up by the idealogues for the slaughter, for whom it took ten years of mishaps of death and decay on a nightmare landscape to reach the nickname of 'Chief' and the insanity to show for it.

Fighting and dying; two acts, the same indescribable beauty of the war.
Suddenly I remembered my mother's savage, heartrending cry, her face bathed in sweat, the horrible spasm that had disfigured her, and then, on that same, horribly twisted face, the radiance of the smile born with a child's cry, when she saw his tiny red legs beat the air...Barbaric beauty of life, of creation. It had slipped away, dissolved in the myriad memories of childhood.
I was seized with terror. No one can bathe in two different streams at the same time. Me, my friends, we had lived this war for too long, steeped ourselves for too long in the beauty of all its moments of fire and blood. Would it still be possible, one day, for us to go back, to rediscover our roots, the beauty of creation, the rapture of a peaceful life?

Fortunately for us, there is a mercy the soul of someone utterly sick with blood spilled for an ideal, and so we don't mind being enmeshed in the memorial swamp of this "gook" as much. Or perhaps we do, for we don't want to hear of forbearance of raping out of concern for the eventual danger of pregnant labor, we don't want to know about what horrors of flora and fauna will be birthed out of a healthy sprinkling of mortar and military grade herbicide, we don't want to see the blonde-haired blue-eyed as an unnatural invader after all this respect and courage and love of the other side, a side with its own measure of brave people and unfeeling corruption. You don't need Communism for an all but (are you sure?) Soylent Green extraction of the many by the few. You just need humanity, greed, their inherent love for lies, all of them ubiquitous, all of them wherever you may lay your weary head.

"Everything we've paid for with our blood belongs to the people."
Kha just laughed. "Ah, but do the people really exist?...You see, the people, they do exist from time to time, but they're only a shadow. When they need rice, the people are the buffalo that pulls the plow. When they need soldiers, they cover the people with armor, put guns in the people's hands. When all is said and done, at the festivals, when it comes time for the banquets, they put the people on an alter, and feed them incense and ashes. But the real food, that's always for them."

We haven't even touched upon the redemption and the fever craze, the insipidness of mortal circumstances and the graveyard leech of military success, the postcolonial inheritance of cannibal ideals and the retributional maw of time, what happens when everything is said and done and the pieces expect to be picked up. But you can find out for yourself.

Revolution, like love, blooms and then withers. But revolution rots much faster than love, 'comrade.'

( )

The author of this novel of the Vietnam war led a Communist youth brigade to the front when she was 20. Of the group of 40, she was one of three survivors.

The novel is narrated by Quan, who at 28 has been at the front for 10 years. Quan is given leave to return home for a short while, and is also given the task of bringing home news of the death of one of his fellow villagers, a childhood friend. As he walks the hundreds of miles back north, he contemplates his childhood and his time at the front.

When he and his comrades first went to war they were enthusiastic and believed deeply in their cause. They were prepared to do anything to oust the enemy invaders from their homeland. Ten years later Quan has become disillusioned with the corruption of some of the leadership. When he arrives at his village, the village leaders treat him as a hero and want him to give inspirational speeches to the villagers extolling the glory of Vietnam. He wants to find his childhood sweetheart, who had told him that she would wait for him.

This is a memorable book, and should be read by anyone with an interest in the Vietnam war. The descriptions of the life of a Viet Cong soldier were fascinating. Their isolation from their homes and loved ones for so many years (10 years in Quan's case) did not, for the most part, affect their resolve. This book provides an interesting insight into why it was never possible for the US to win this war. Beyond being a novel of the nightmarish conditions of war, it is also a novel of a young man's childhood and individual growth. Quan is a character I came to admire, and who caused me to reflect on the Vietnam war through a different prism. ( )