The thought of war pulls me into a strange, suspended in-between: a space where I’m acutely aware of the ordinary peace around me, the warm bustling chatter in the streets where I sit, and yet my mind drifts into this surreal dimension of pain. The kind that feels too overwhelmingly visceral to ignore, yet too amorphous to fully grasp. It’s as if I’m processing a tender wound unhealed yet already passed down through generations, aching incessantly beneath the surface of peace.

Việt Nam has changed. We’ve built over the ruins. Skyscrapers rise where bombs once fell. There are rooftop bars where people sip cocktails above streets that once burned. Still, the past slips through—in the stories our grandparents tell of the 1970s, in the grainy black-and-white photographs freezing wartime in shades of smoke and silence, hung on the café wall right beside me. I feel disoriented, trying to make sense of a war I never lived through while being so firmly anchored in peace, and maybe that’s why, almost without thinking, I reach across the table for The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh, the place where the war feels close enough to touch.

I fall back into my seat with the book cushioned in my hands. This will be my fourth time reading it, and yet I pause before opening it, needing to brace myself. When I finally do, the sorrow seems to seep straight from the ink into my bones. Bảo Ninh shows how war reduces soldiers’ emotions to the most primal of instincts, to the most rudimentary traits of human nature, down to skin and bone, barren and unthinking. It’s a harrowing existential revelation to witness what it means to be human in its most forsaken form. My eyes narrow, my heart pounds in rhythm with the scenes as they bombard one after another; paradoxes of emotions cascading, each wave crashing into what came before. At times, everything becomes viscous, paralyzing—a vast force of sadness that consumes soldiers, nature, and readers long after the guns fall silent. But nothing is ever truly silent. In Kiên’s mind, barrages of memories rage on, taking him hostage, battling his desperate but feeble resistance to anchor himself in the now. In war, I begin to grasp, one bleeds out not quickly but through a slow, decaying erosion of faith and humanity. War becomes so tangibly alive through Bảo Ninh. I read his chimes of sorrow out loud, confronting myself with the text because reading in silence would feel like a disservice. I speak it, so achingly haunting that I unconsciously wrap my fingers around the book like a fragile artifact, a relic of a pain that belongs to all of us, in some form.

I was born long after the last shots were fired, and what I know firsthand of war is scant. My parents grew up just after it ended, but even my grandparents who survived it rarely spoke of it. And if they did, their voices often trailed off mid-sentence, as if the memories collapsed under their own weight. “Thời đó khổ lắm,” they would say quietly. “That time was hard.” That’s all. The war was always there, yet somehow almost always just out of reach. So I don’t claim to understand war. Not in the way those who lived through it do. But I do feel it in the ripple of stories I was told and the silences that hung over Tết dinner tables whenever we asked our grandparents about their childhood. I can’t tell you what war is like, but I can tell you what it means to me. To do so is, in a way, its own kind of duty: Kiên, the protagonist, who writes and writes for his fallen comrades even though he bleeds . . . bleeds, the more he writes. In that same spirit, I speak of war, even as someone who never lived through it, because forgetting would be its own kind of violence.

I write because I wonder if the war is remembered at all by my generation. April 30, 1975, when it ended, yes. The names of battles, yes. The sorrow, the victory, the pride, the distance. Yes. Some look back on it with pride, others with detachment, as if war seems to have been a thing distinctly of the past. But for those in my generation who do care, do we feel it?

I doubt it. Even my grandparents hardly seem to dissect the wound, and society seems to have comfortably moved forward from the aftermath that was well settled into history textbooks and etched into memorials. I wonder if we have moved on too fast; I wonder if this is what we’ve yet to learn: how to remember properly, not just the victories or the cost, even, but how we let it happen in the first place.

We’ve learned how to move forward. We’ve learned how to name destruction and that in the best of cases, we swear a quiet oath to ourselves never again, because I’m sure we understand that war in the end is always a form of loss. There is this haunting moment in The Sorrow of War: the unbearable moment when Kiên realizes he shoots and kills without hesitation. The horror of becoming someone he no longer recognizes. Something inside him breaks—his faith in his enemies, in his comrades, and most painfully, in himself. Maybe we all have our own versions of that collapse, playing out in the mundane arguments between people and the fallouts of friendships. Maybe it’s when you find you can no longer unsee the face of someone who hurt you, or worse, the face you wore when you hurt them. It’s the betrayal of who you thought they were, or who you believed you were. That painful realization you never imagined until you found yourself, like Kiên, caught in a struggle for power, for pride, for the need to win. It strips people down to their rawest, ugliest selves. And in the wreckage, you’re left to reckon with what has gone wrong.

Through Bảo Ninh, I have come to realize that war is not just the violence we do to others, but also the violence we do to ourselves when we forget how to be human. And I believe we already know, all too well, the cost of war: the collapse of something deeply human—that is, connection, faith, and capacity for compassion.

What have we not learned? How easily war breaks out. How fragile peace is. How we seem to only recognize war when the first bullet is fired or an argument explodes, but it begins in the smallest, most ordinary moments when we choose pride over compassion, when we follow the impulse to see others as separate.

When we turn away from something human in ourselves:

Sometimes for pride.

Sometimes for ego.

Sometimes for the illusion of control.

Sometimes for the desperate need to protect what’s ours.

But once you see your perceived enemies as people like you, something softens. You share. You let go. In truth, we are not so different after all: anchored by the same fragile hopes, the same longings, the same quiet ache to be understood.

What war asks of us is to remember properly as an act of reckoning and responsibility. How we let it happen. So, maybe to be human—50 years after war, in the quiet of peace and all the silent spaces between—is to remember that we can choose otherwise.

Phạm Bùi Gia Khanh is a 17-year-old high school student who lives in Hà Nội, Việt Nam. A lover of philosophy, math, and literature, she received a Distinction in the British Mathematical Olympiad Round 1. In 2023, she was one of the first two students to represent Việt Nam at the International Philosophy Olympiad, where she earned an Honorable Mention. She is the founder of Camp Lumina, a writing camp exploring philosophy and literature, and edited the anthology The Light Within (Hanoi Publishing House). She is now organizing Legacy In Ink: Vietnamese Global Writers’ Contest celebrating Vietnamese heritage.