Trauma In The Sorrow Of War

Throughout The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh, Kien struggles to deal with the trauma of being a soldier in the Vietnam war. He had to witness many of his friends and all of his platoon die, while he survived. Bao Ninh uses Kien’s excessive drinking and violence to demonstrate trauma in The Sorrow of War.
Trauma affects everyone different, but many people use the same strategy as a solution to this problem. “Kien began drinking...He wandered around watching the soldiers looting, and joined in the drinking and destruction” (Ninh 106). All the soldiers experienced events that have affected them personally and therefore they resort to drinking and destroying everything. Kien is not the only one that has began drinking because in this scene, all of the soldiers are looting and drinking in the

“He came when he was drunk; it became clear to her that he would drink himself into a certain state as he wrote, then decide he needed to see the attic and to see her” (Ninh 112). Whenever he thinks of the war, he has to drink because it helps to relieve some of the trauma. He can talk out all of his problems to the mute girl, but he must be drunk before he goes to her. “The experience of control over helplessness will count for much more than anyone’s warnings about the long-term consequences of alcohol abuse” (Bloom 4). When Kien drank, he did not think about the consequences of the alcohol, but only that it helped relieve the pain of trauma for a brief moment. Both the alcohol and the mute girl help him temporarily cope with the trauma of war.
Trauma has affected the life of Kien and everyone around him. Kien is experiencing intense trauma because he is the only one that survived in his platoon and he had to witness one of his close friends be abused. To cope with some of the trauma, Kien uses alcohol and violence which temporarily makes him forget about his