A Tale Of Two Wars ?

The publication of Bao Ninh’s, The Sorrow of War (Noi buon chien tranh) in Vietnam in 1991 (reprinted from a 1990 mimeograph version) and the publication of Charles Coleman’s “war novel that made PTSD real,” Sergeant Back Again (Harper & Row in the US) were separated by a decade—since Coleman’s novel hit the bookstores in December, 1980. That was five years and nine months after the North Vietnamese Army (NLF) declared conclusive victory over the South by finally overrunning Saigon and Tan Son Nhat Airport and roundly defeating the American forces who had more than supported “the corrupt regime” of the South with $1.2 trillion (in 2025) dollars; with the loss of 58,279 American servicemen killed; with 300,000-plus wounded (not including the “walking wounded”) and—in 1980—with the invention of a new term for a new (US-borne) psychiatric disorder originally called post-traumatic stress syndrome and later, of course, PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), of which way more than 250,000 Viet vets still suffer with approximately 100,000 confirmed suicides from 1979-2019 alone.

Back in the day, the US Embassy and nearby Defense Attache Office buildings were located in the center of Saigon, around six miles from the Airport. But they might as well have been 6,000 miles apart given what really went down at those two locations over those final two days of “the War” ending as it did on April 29-30, 1975. Days as different as their two novels. As different as their two countries. Their two states of mind. As different as their two chapter beginnings and their two endings. As different as their voices, tenses, settings and lives lived and imagined but all finally coalescing as mirror images of each other recording the same sorrowful, traumatic outcomes.