Kien and the MIA team return to the Jungle of Screaming Souls to collect the remains of fallen soldiers.

Kien recalls the 27th Battalion being nearly wiped out in a devastating battle deep in the jungle.

Soldiers smoke canina root to forget daily suffering, death, and the terror of tomorrow.

ARVN commandos kidnap and murder the three farm girls the platoon soldiers had been secretly visiting.

Kien's platoon ambushes the commandos, killing three and forcing the other four to dig their own graves.

The truck driver wakes Kien from screaming nightmares and declares he will never be free of war memories.

Kien begins writing a novel in his Hanoi room, calling it his sacred duty to preserve the stories of the dead.

Kien arrives home to Hanoi after the war and finds Phuong living with another man, and they fight bitterly.

Kien's platoon captures the Saigon airport on Victory Day, but his friend Oanh is shot dead by a wounded girl.

Hoa guides Kien's unit through the jungle, then sacrifices herself — shooting the Americans' dog — so Kien can escape.

Kien finds Phuong on the train after her rape and kills the sailor who assaulted her with an iron pipe.

Kien awakens in an abandoned school to find Phuong gone; soldiers tell him she has been with truck drivers.

Kien hears Phuong calling his name in the darkness but does not answer, and walks away from her.

A letter from a former soldier reaches Kien, revealing they lied — Phuong had remained innocent and faithful.

Bao Ninh steps into the narrative, claiming he found and compiled Kien's disordered manuscript pages.

The novel opens with Kien on a team recovering the remains of soldiers from the Jungle of Screaming Souls, a battlefield where his battalion was nearly destroyed. As he sleeps among the bodies, memories of war flood back — the deaths of comrades, the violence of ambushes, and the suffering that never fades. The reader then follows Kien through his postwar life in Hanoi, where he begins writing a novel he calls his sacred duty, desperate to keep the stories of the dead alive. His love for Phuong, his childhood sweetheart who has been devastated by the war, runs as a current through everything he writes and remembers. The novel spirals through the war's final battles, the sacrifices of those around him, and the brutal night the war truly began for Kien — when Phuong was raped on a southbound train. The story closes with Bao Ninh stepping into the narrative as compiler, blurring the line between memory and fiction.

Kien's wartime experiences and the novel he writes to survive them.

Can confesses to Kien that he wants to desert the regiment and return home to his mother.

Can's body is found by military police after he attempts to flee through the jungle alone.

Kien remembers the platoon's nightly card games as soldiers tried to pass the endless wartime hours.

Kien visits Doi Mo hamlet years after the war and spends the night with the daughter of his former host.

Kien saves a young prostitute on a Hanoi street and realizes she is the younger sister of fallen soldier Vinh.

Kien rides the victorious Unification troop train home and sleeps with a woman named Hien in a hammock while soldiers laugh.

Kien visits Sinh, a former comrade who was paralyzed in the war and now lies at home waiting to die.

Kien writes about Phan, who hides in a bomb crater with a wounded enemy and accidentally allows the man to drown.

Kien sees the naked body of a dead girl at the Saigon airport, an image that haunts him for years afterward.

Kien wanders Hanoi at night and watches veteran soldiers drink themselves to unconsciousness at the Balcony café.

Kien fights a street tough who insults Phuong outside a Hanoi café.

Kien boards a tram driven by former neighbor Huynh, whose son Kien watched die on the battlefield.

Kien visits his stepfather just before leaving for the war, then returns after the war to find him dead.

Phuong plays the piano for Kien — her mother raised her as a pianist, but the war stripped the music from her life.

Kien finds peace at last, able to return to the happy memories of Phuong's innocence and their shared youth.

Beyond the central arc of Kien's writing and his love for Phuong, the novel is filled with vivid secondary lives — soldiers who deserted, comrades who returned home broken, and civilians caught in the war's wake. These stories emerge through Kien's memories as he wanders Hanoi, visits old acquaintances, and encounters strangers who carry the same invisible wounds. His observations in postwar Hanoi — the veterans at the Balcony café, the tram driver mourning his son, the prostitute who is a fallen soldier's sister — paint a portrait of a city that cannot escape its past. Even the smaller wartime memories, like Phan's accidental drowning of a wounded man or the haunting image of a dead girl at the airport, accumulate into a deeper portrait of collective sorrow. Phuong's abandoned piano and the stepfather found dead upon Kien's return add further texture to how thoroughly the war dismantled ordinary life. The pool concludes with Kien finally finding a measure of peace by holding onto the memory of Phuong's innocence.

The supporting stories of sacrifice and survival that shaped Kien's world.

The reader discovers Kien is not in 1975 but in Hanoi, nearly forty, writing a novel about the war.

Kien's father, dismissed by the Communist Party, retreats to his attic studio and drinks through the nights painting alone.

Kien's father loses his will to live and dies on the very first day Hanoi's air-raid sirens sound.

The mute girl living in Kien's father's attic falls silently in love with Kien, knowing he mistakes her for other women.

Kien finishes his novel but begins burning the manuscript pages, believing they have lost all value.

The mute girl stops Kien from destroying the manuscript and secretly preserves every page after he leaves.

Kien experiences a terrifying vision of death while writing but resolves he has a generation's debt to repay before dying.

Kien and Phuong spend their last perfect day at the lake, where she tells him the future holds only war and death.

Kien is sent to war the day after the lake, while all his classmates are dismissed for university examinations.

Phuong tells Kien after the war that she has done terrible things to survive and says they will never see each other again.

Kien finds Phuong at the blacked-out rail station during the city's evacuation and they board a freight train heading south together.

A sailor interrupts a school beach camping trip to warn the students that war with America is coming soon.

American planes attack the freight train; Kien glimpses a man assaulting Phuong before an explosion knocks him unconscious.

Kien raises a gun to his own head after seeing Phuong bathing naked, but hears her voice in the darkness and stops.

Bao Ninh recognizes Kien in the manuscript and declares they share a common sorrow, hoping Kien found peace in his memories.

The novel's deepest turning points are structural as well as personal — the sudden revelation that the jungle scenes are a memory within a memory, written by a man near forty in a Hanoi apartment, reframes everything the reader has encountered. The losses that shaped Kien begin long before the war, with his father's destruction of his own art and his death on the first day of the bombing, and with Phuong's quiet prophecy of ruin on a perfect afternoon at the lake. The freight train journey south — where Kien loses Phuong to violence and then cannot bring himself to call out to her in the dark — forms the emotional core of the novel's tragedy. Against this, the mute girl's silent preservation of Kien's manuscript and his own near-suicide stand as the story's most intimate moments of collapse and survival. The pool closes with Bao Ninh recognizing Kien's voice in the pages and acknowledging their shared, immense sorrow of war.