Fantastic Pairing for a Literature Class--Tim O'Brien and Bao Ninh

Tim O'Brien, a well-known American writer of the Vietnam War details the hard decisions and horrors faced by soldiers. His collection of short stories called The Things They Carried could easily be used in a classroom paired with Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of the War, which is centered on the narrator's own platoon from North Vietnam.

Bao Ninh fought in the Vietnam War himself as did Tim O'Brien. Bao Ninh began in Hanoi in 1969 and went through the fall of Saigon in 1975. Both of these authors draw extensively on their own personal experiences to create beautiful AND disturbing literature.

Both authors choose not to glorify war or its cause in any way. In the same token, they refuse to vilify their enemies. Both narrators question why this war was ever fought and humanize their enemies for the readers. From both of them we understand that no matter what side you were on or for or against, real people died.

In O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the narrator kills a man and wonders whether this person wrote poetry or what kind of person he was. While his buddies are very happy about his kill, our narrator cannot reconcile himself to the fact that the actually took the life of a fellow human being.

In Ninh's The Sorrow of War, Ninh tells a story that is similar. Phan accidentally stabs a dying enemy and after listening to him call and call for help, the protagonist Phan goes in search of a medical kit. But when he finds the kit, he can't find the crater where he left the man. It is raining, and all the holes are getting filled with water. So, in both of these pieces, the authors discover that the opposing soldiers are victims too.