Comparison of the things they carried from O' Brien and The sorrow of the war of Ninh The sorrow of the war of Bao Ninh is a contrapuntal reading of American literature on the Vietnam War. But rather than being a stark contrast to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War is eerily similar, but different at the same time. From a postcolonialist point of view, both works must be taken into account to have a faithful image of the war. The sorrow of war is a great counterpoint because it is truthful. Tim O'Brien writes: "...you can tell a true war story through its absolute, uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." » (O'Brien, 42) Bao Ninh succeeds in this regard. And that’s why the Vietnamese government initially banned The Sorrow of War. A close textual and historical examination of Vietnam's war and postwar experience reveals that its experience was similar to, if not worse than, America's. One of the most remarkable counterpoints to Kien/Boa Ninh's war experience is his perspective. of American soldiers. To him, they were horrible, powerful and inhuman. For American soldiers, the war was a journey into a strange world where snipers hid behind every bush. North Vietnamese soldiers had already been fighting for fifteen years and saw the country tearing itself apart. They now had to face hundreds of thousands of fresh soldiers from the world's technological superpower. A little scarier. This historical aspect is reflected in the text. For Bao Ninh, the enemy was not always a man capable of killing other men. "The diamond-shaped clearing was filled with bodies killed by helicopter gunships. Broken bodies, shattered bodies, vaporized bodies." (Ninh, 5) How...... middle of paper... a fashion in which we have no sorrow for the "communists". But what we find is that the Vietnamese soldiers were not fighting for communism, they were fighting because the government ordered them to. “Those who loved war were not young men but others like politicians, middle-aged men with big bellies and short legs.” (75) Repeatedly, The Sorrow of War reveals the deep suffering of Vietnam. However, we cannot say that the American soldiers returned unscathed. The most important thing one sees when reading the two works mentioned above is not the differences, but the similarities. The war is hellish and unnatural for both sides. Subsequently, our common humanity becomes evident in universal suffering. Works Cited: Ninh, Bao The Sorrow of WarNew York: Riverhead Books 1993O'Brien, Tim The Things They Carried New York: Penguin Books 1990