58  North  Vietnam –Bao Ninh  –  The Sorrows of War (Score 5.75)

After the end of the Vietnam War the North Vietnamese army sent parties into the jungle to find the bodies of the soldiers missing in action from the particular group with which they served. This seems to be a very humane thing to do, to give their families closure.

Kien is one of the finders, travelling as a passenger in a large Russian lorry towards the sector in which he and his comrades served. He is reminiscing about the war. From his description of the fire power, and superior weaponry available to the American troops, he and his friends seem to have been in the position of the Native Americans towards the end when fighting with bows or single shot muskets against repeating rifles and pistols, and sometimes even Gatling guns.

The story chops and changes, moving around with seemingly neither rhyme nor reason. It is stated to be a first novel, and it shows. It certainly doesn’t deserve the eight or nine glowing references at the beginning. At one stage one of Kien’s colleagues is hit in the face by machine-gun fire, apparently losing an eye but with no further damage. Did the bullet simply disappear?

Apart from maybe the first half dozen pages I found the book dreadfully boring. I speed-read the rest of the book and didn’t find anything at all to entice me to slow down. I scored the book at two.