War and Violence

Much of the narrative focuses in the emphatic illustration of the horrors of war, thereby stripping all moral justification from war and other forms of violence. The novel is mostly set in Laos, which was catastrophically ravaged by bombings and military actions during the Laotian Civil War. A major contribution to this destruction was the years-long bombing campaign carried out by the United States: “These bombing missions would last nine years (1964 to 1973) and would end up totaling more than five hundred and eighty thousand. This is the equivalent of one bombardment every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day, for nine year” (vii). The effects of these bombing raids are made evident in the novel itself, as the characters struggle to scrape together a life in Laos, both during the war and in the wake of it.

The novel also explores violence on a more...