Than Phan Cua Tinh Yeu ("The Sorrow of War")

The mountains and jungles are water-soaked and dull. Wet trees; quiet jungles. All day and all night the water streams. A sea of greenish vapor slides over the jungle's carpet of rotting leaves. That was now.

But then was the dry season when the sun burned harshly, the wind blew fiercely, and the enemy sent napalm spraying through the jungle and a sea of fire enveloped them, spreading like the fires of hell. Troops in the fragmented companies tried to regroup, only to be blown out of the ground again as they went mad, became disoriented and threw themselves into nets of bullets, dying in the flaming inferno.

After that battle no one mentioned Battalion 27 any more, though numerous souls of ghosts and devils were born in that deadly defeat. They were still loose, wandering in every corner and bush in the jungle, drifting along the stream, refusing to depart for the Other World. From then on it was called the Jungle of Screaming Souls.

Here, when it is dark, trees and plants moan in awful harmony. When the ghostly music begins it unhinges the soul and the entire wood looks the same no matter where you are standing. Not a place for the timid. Living here one could go mad or be frightened to death. Which was why in the rainy season of 1974, when the regiment was sent back to this area, Kien and his scout squad established an altar and prayed before it in secret, honoring and recalling the wandering souls from Battalion 27 still in the Jungle of Screaming Souls.

- Bao Ninh, Than Phan Cua Tinh Yeu (The Sorrow of War),
Hanoi, 1991, pages 1-3

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