No one should ever have to visit the 'jungle of screaming souls' and
yet the very fact that it exists fills me with wonder. Wonder firstly at the tenacity, forbearance and principles of the man that created it - Veitnamese author Bao Ninh in his masterful novel The Sorrow of War published in 1991.
A veteran of the Veitnam war, Kein went in to battle aged 17 and of the 500 young men serving in his glorious 27th Youth Brigade was one of only 10 that survived. So Sorrow is certainly not written as a winner's novel it is a deep
and humbling meditation on the human cost of conflict.
It's inconceivable that the commonplace horrors of war it relates were not part of Binh's own experience. And at the centre of these horrors - which include rape, the loss of family, the loss of self, mental torture long after the war has ended - is the forest of screaming souls.
This is what Ninh saw in 1969 - "napalm spreading through the jungle" causing "a sea of fire...like the fires of hell..." The forest is ruined by the chemical scourge that is Agent orange and, in the ferocious heat of the Veitnamese summer, the the stench of the putrifying corpses left behind is overpowering. Then the rainy season comes the marshes run "rust coloured" with the blood, bloated bodies, incinerated jungle animals float in thick mud
of rotting meat. But the souls and spirits of the dead can not find peace or escape - and so the Jungle of Screaming Souls is named. At night deep in the jungle "sobbing whispers" are heard "howls are carried oon the wind". Fireflies as big as soldiers helmets circulate, the bamboo shoots grow back a horrible colour infected with thick diseased wheals. And the spirit of the dead are there always screaming back at the living.
What good can ever come out of war? None, really, but human beings have to make some sense of their experiences - especially the bad ones or they risk being overpowered by them and descending into darkness. And then the warmongers, the agents of death have won. Ninh is a hero in the battle for peace because, by bearing witness to history and sorting through his experiences with such compassion and understanding, he delivered a book that will always be there so future generations can learn from the tragedy.
As an author he had little support from either side as they sought to
spin their respective narratives about the conflict after the war had
ended.
In Vietnam his novel was actually banned for many years partly because it shows the cruelty on both sides and the indoctrination that he and thousands of other teenagers are put through to turn them into soldiers, which ultimately often means ending up trapped in the Forest of Screaming Souls, a terrible warning to the world.
And of course as Ninh's novel shows - in all too graphic detail - the terrifying results of American involvement in Vietnam his beautifully sensual prose found a relatively small audience - compared to books by American survivors or movies by American directors. But Nihn did not yield, his testimony may be all the more powerful as he has not as yet followed it, for fear of repeating himself. The fact that his book exists makes me wonder how intelligent men could ever again shape the purgatorial nightmare it describes in The Jungle Of Screaming Souls. A place no one should ever have to visit but a place any leader contemplating sending artillery and military firepower into a foreign land should be forced to read and think about.
The greatest wonder is that anyone who has read even the first 10 pages of Ninh's masterpiece would not wish to banish forever the crime against humanity - and nature - that is chemical warfare. Read the rest of the book and you wonder how anyone would not wish to banish the crime against humanity that is warfare itself too.