Sometimes in travel you meet a local who shares his soul with you, who paints evocative images of a place and time and invites you to see it too, even if only through words on a page. In January 2004, thanks to a kid selling pirated books on the streets of Hanoi, Vietnam, this happened to me.
I would never meet Bao Ninh in person. But through his first novel, The Sorrow of War, I met him nonetheless. Born in 1952, Ninh served in the North Vietnamese army. Of the five hundred men in his brigade, only he and nine others survived the conflict.