We are first shown a representation of love when Kien discovers that some of the soldiers in his platoon have been visiting nearby farm girls. This first portrayal of love is at once excited and desperate: all aware that they are likely to die in the near future. The love that they experience is a frantic refuge from the realities of war. Thus, with the dark cloud of despair hanging over the men, their encounters with the girls are rushed and hopeless as they realise how little time they have together. ‘These small acts of love were an omen of terrible things to come.’ This bitterness comes to a head when the men discover that their sweethearts have been shot. The deaths of these girls represents the end of hope for the men as they realise that even their pure and perfect love is without sanctity in the presence of war. This first portrayal of love is tragic and brief, allowing us to draw parallels with the lives of the soldiers who die in battle shortly after. As this takes place in the Jungle of Screaming Souls, it is fitting that the events indirectly force Kien to re-evaluate the presence of the ethereal in the jungle. ‘Some of us said it was mountain ghosts, but Kien knew it was love’s lament.’
Chronologically prior to this but in terms of the book, later on, Kien’s and Phuong’s trip to the lake is a sharp contrast to this first heartbreaking love story. Both barely children, their petty acts of rebellion seem deeply exciting and delightful. It is ironic, once again, that this should take place while the others are playing war games: everything is light and insubstantial and, unlike the soldiers, no despair or bitterness hangs over their liaisons. Perhaps with the aid of nostalgia, in Kien’s memory, the day is ‘so intimate, so perfect, that it made [Kien] ache.’ Their love is the only thing on their minds and, as such, they are able to experience it fully without the torments of prior heartbreak or the eventuality of upcoming death. At the end of this passage, however, Ninh uses his repeating motif of water to demonstrate that this flawlessness cannot last. Their encounter at the lake is a languidly peaceful stretch of the river. It is the ‘long, new stretch of river, full of fire’ in Kien’s life that will rip the two apart with the sorrow of war.
Although he establishes war’s ability to conquer love, Ninh nonetheless compares the effect of war to the sensation of heartbreak. ‘It was a sadness, a missing, a pain.’ By doing this, not only does he make an ironic comment upon one’s relationship with the mistress of War, but also succeeds in demonstrating the ways in which they are truly alike and can reduce grown men to emotional wrecks. Ninh’s depiction of love lost is essentially a dull ache of sadness which sharpens with any specific trigger. It is interesting to note, however, that, on the ‘recognition of some wonderful truth inside him’; Kien claims that it feels like ‘love’. In this way, Ninh is able to show the last straw of hopefulness in relation to love than Kien and the other soldiers cling to.
Ninh’s depiction of love in war is powerfully sad. However, in its portrayal and the frequent references to the past, he is able to demonstrate the importance of the past as a sort of asylum in times of despair, such as war. Had he lived a normal life, Kien might have been able to forget Phuong and dismiss her as a childhood sweetheart. With war having destroyed this possibility, her ‘beautiful youth’ manifests itself as a symbol of the ‘lost opportunities’ of his youthful love. Although Kien may have loved and lost, it is better this than never having loved at all, as the cliché goes. Kien’s ‘first love had not been in vain.’ Kien’s love for Phuong is still able to live on, in his dreams of the past, and in this way, conversely, Ninh shows how love might perhaps be able to triumph over war after all.