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The novel also portrays how war impacts the basic needs of all humanity, such as food to eat. Starvation was not atypical of the Vietcong and the villagers, because many of the rice fields were lost through the bombing. The smallest amounts of horrendous tasting food, which do not even offer any nutrition, are worth gold. Early in the novel, Quan declines orangutan soup, where even the animal's hands are cooked. People steal and fight over food and use it as a means of barter.

Such stories are distasteful to everyone. The Vietnamese government even banned A Novel with No Name because of the "scathing dissection of the day-to-day realities of life for the Vietnamese during the final years of the Vietnam War." Apparently so much of the detailed material was brought to everyone's attention in this book, that Duong was arrested and jailed for seven months in 1991. Naturally, books such as this are just as difficult for Americans to read especially since the Vietnam War was very controversial and needlessly took so many lives on both sides.

How can one say which of these writers' works is more personally disturbing? Each war was so atrocious in its own way. Given the futility of the Vietnam War (which was not even a declared war) as well as the immense disrespect for the Geneva Convention and the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians, perhaps this was a greater hell. However, can there be one hell greater than another?