The Sorrow of War - Extract from an article commented on.

""Even me, I'm nearly forty. I was seventeen at the start of the war in 1965, twenty-seven at the fall of Saigon in 1975. So, how many long years have passed? Ten or eleven? Twelve? No. Thirteen? Another year with the MIA team. Or was it longer? And more time wandering as a veteran. Closer to fourteen years lost because of the war." - page 48

The atrocity of the war also made it hard for him to readjust to peacetime. Almost everything reminded him about an event during the war. His life was now full of flashback, vivid blood, dead bodies, screaming souls, sounding explosions, and much more. Although the war was over, Kien was living it still in his mind and soul."

http://www.helium.com/items/784901-book-reviews-the-sorrow-of-war-by-baoh-nihn

This illustrates just how difficult it was for Kien and all the other surviving soldiers to come back after the war and try and live a normal life again, and not just the soldiers, the Vietnamese people too. After the war, there was great focus on the Americans and how the American soldiers were coping once the war had ended, that no attention or thought was paid to the Vietnamese despite them loosing more men.

The struggling to remember how many years it has has been since the war shows that while in war, time has no significance and days, months and years just merge into one. And, though the war was a major and dramatic part of his life and when the war finally stopped, it was a definite change, Kien struggles to remember how long along it was because war has taken away his sense of time.