by Tom Bissell
Acclaim for Tom Bissell's
THE Father OF All Things
“Powerful… eloquent and in-depth…. The Father of All Things is a one-of-a-kind accomplishment.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Combines the virtues of distance and immediacy—the cool perspective that comes from investigating a war that was pretty much over before the author was born and the searing immediacy of being raised by a troubled veteran of that lost war Supple, complex and a relief from the most recent waves of books about Vietnam.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Stunning…. Embraces the sometimes difficult, invariably challenging ties all men have with their fathers. The stories of our relation ships with our dads are in these pages. Finding them is finding ourselves.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Engrossing. … By turns hilarious, grief-stricken, perplexed and enlightening, Bissell's account of [the father-son] trip offers a new understanding of the war, one designed for all those Americans who, though too young to remember it, still live in its shadow.” —Salon
“Ambitious…. Bissell writes with conviction, and his prose, if sometimes swashbuckling, has moments of startling beauty.”
—The New Yorker
“If all sons learned even a tenth as much about their fathers’ wars as Tom Bissell has learned about the war his father, John Bissell, fought as a Marine officer in Vietnam, the United States would be in a much better place today…. Live and learn, [The Father of All Things] tells us, or be condemned to repeat the errors of the past.”
—The New Leader
“A triumph…. Vivid and commanding Adventurous in structure, urgent in content.” —The Seattle Times
“In this touching, sometimes comic portrayal of a son's struggles to understand and cope with a father's dark experiences in Vietnam, Tom Bissell's maturing talents are on full display. He shows that wars never end, not only for the warriors but also for their children.”
—Philip Caputo
“Bissell is a terrific prose stylist—nervy, metaphor-mad. He takes nothing for granted … [and] brings an urgency and freshness to [The Father of All Things].” —The Dallas Morning News
“Bissell is a recognized teller of the odd, the curious and the wondrous; a young man who can fathom deep truths from what he experiences and observes…. Bissell brings us along on what is truly a journey of discovery.” —The Decatur Daily
“So well written it leaves the reader breathless.” —Tucson Citizen
“Bissell comes at the subject with a fresh perspective A probing and poignant look at the complicated legacy of war—and often quite funny to boot.” —New York magazine
“Bissell… seems to be shaping his own genre An eccentric blend of travelogue, history and histrionic self-revelation Impressive.”
—Detroit Free Press
“A remarkable story that teaches us new things about the lingering legacy of war and about the power of the human spirit not only to endure but also, through hard-earned love and understanding between a father and his son, to triumph. It is also an exciting and wonderfully nuanced travel memoir that allows the reader surprisingly deep and abiding insights into a culture to which we as Americans are inextri cably bound.”
—Bruce Weigl
“There is something fresh—and often raw, funny and enlightening— in [Bissell's] take on this well-parsed topic.” —Time Out New York
“A fine combination of travel narrative and a terse, research-based his tory of the war's perverse aspects…. Combines precise description with mordant humor.” —Time Out Chicago
“An exuberant amalgam of anecdotal memoir, fact-based imagining, popular history, travel narrative, and interviews with sons and daughters of Vietnamese and American veterans.… We should be thankful Bissell has opened this dialogue.” —AARP, The Magazine
“A permanent contribution to the essential literature of America's cat astrophic misadventure in Vietnam. Bissell has brilliantly combined a deep portrait of his conflicted relationship with his warrior father, a fair-minded but shattering account of the war itself, and a vivid trav elogue of present-day Vietnam. In every branch of this endeavor, the bravery of Bissell's engagement, his intelligence, and his uncanny eye for the conclusive detail are on rich display. This is a triumphant piece of work.” —Norman Rush
“The Father of All Things is at once a beautifully lyrical travel narrative, memoir, history, and political critique. Beyond that, Bissell has cre ated an inimitable book ambitious and extensive in scope, a scope not bogged down by its own broadness, one grand in subject and line-by line precision. A stunning book, it is a new way to look at and read the war.” —Mary Magazine
“Well-crafted, insightful…. A unique accomplishment that, astound- ingly, stands alone among the thousands of books written about the Vietnam War.” —Veteran
Tom Bissell
THE Father OF All Things
Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea and God Lives in St. Petersburg and a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine and The Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2006 he was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007 Conde Nast Traveler named Chasing the Sea one of the eighty-six best travel books of all time. His work is often anthologized and has been published in six languages. He currently lives in Las Vegas, where he is a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Also by Tom Bissell
FICTION
God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories
NONFICTION
Chasing the Sea:
Being a Narrative of a Journey Through Uzbekistan, Including Descriptions of Life Therein, Culminating with an Arrival at the Aral Sea, the World's Worst Man-Made Ecological Catastrophe, in One Volume
HUMOR
Speak, Commentary.
The Big Little Book of Fake DVD Commentaries, Wherein Well-Known Pundits Make Impassioned Remarks About Classic Science-Fiction Films
(with Jeff Alexander)
Of course, for my father: all things
For my friends Gary Sernovitz, Jeff Alexander, Dan Josefson, Matthew McGough, and Andrew Miller
And for my Vietnamese friends, who showed me their country
War is the father of all and king of all.
Some he shows as gods, others as men.
Some he makes slaves, and others free.
—HERACLITUS
last night i flew with a division of three helo's out over the western side of taqaddum. it is low light level over here which just means there is now moon light, very dark, it is hard to tell the ground from the air. we went for a landing and decided it was too dusty so we headed back in to the airfield and practiced lands on the runway, while we were doing our touch and goes there was alot of small arms fire east of us about 3 to 5 miles in the city of … well i can't say cause i can't spell it. anyways i thought it was cool, on the nvg's (night vision goggles) you can see all the tracers shooting high in the sky. but i don't know what they are shooting at there was nothing over there.
—FROM A U.S. MARINE’S 3/17/04
E-MAIL FROM IRAQ
Contents
Author's Note
A Brief Note on Spelling
ONE: The Fall
TWO: An Illness Caused by Youth OR A Few Queries About the Vietnam War
THREE: The Children of the War Speak
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Author's Note
More than thirty thousand books on Vietnam are currently in print. Why another? one might (and probably did) ask. Especially a book written by someone who was not even alive in March 1973, when the last of the U.S. combat troops return
ed home. I bring to what the Vietnamese call the American War only this: I have spent most of my life thinking about it. Vietnam has occupied a larger portion of my mind than perhaps any other topic. The reason for this is as simple as it is elemental: like 3 million other Americans, my father served to prevent the Republic of Vietnam's collapse to the forces of a largely Communist insurgency aligned with a neighboring nation known as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Like an estimated 800,000 other Americans, my father saw combat during his service. What I could not know about my father because of his experience has always fascinated and troubled me. When the opportunity arose to travel to Vietnam with my father, I accepted instantly, unaware that the magazine piece I intended to write would prove so consuming that I would have no choice but to address our trip and its personal reverberations at much greater length.
I say the war “occupied” a huge portion of my mind but would not dare claim any real suffering because of this. The war did not torment or haunt or injure me. Rather, Vietnam was an abstract shadow that rarely left my other thoughts undarkened. Why might this be? As the literal and spiritual children of veterans who fought the only war in which the United States failed to enact its will, many of us came of age with a view of warfare virtually unknown in the United States since the aftermath of Appomattox, when Confederate children saw their own fathers stumble home in defeat. Many of us grew up ashamed of our fathers’ war—and sometimes of our fathers themselves.
This book is thus my attempt to speak for myself while confronting something I believe many younger Americans feel. I wanted to write a book that was specific to my own experience but also engaged with the universal. In this spirit, I have included a fair amount of what I found to be the more fascinating aspects of, and questions about, recent Vietnamese history. I realized early on that, though I had read a number of books about the Vietnam War, I knew dishearteningly little about its indigenous contexts and historical determinants. (Or that Ho Chi Minh loved volleyball.) Conversations with numerous otherwise knowledgeable people around my age led me to conclude that I was far from alone in my ignorance. I open this book with an account of the Republic of Vietnam's last few weeks of existence, a story that is told alongside my attempt to re-create, as my parents experienced it many thousands of miles away, the night of Saigon's fall in 1975. The Republic of Vietnam was not the only thing terminated on that day. A certain kind of American experience ended on April 30,1975, while another, more benighted experience began.
Allow me now to anticipate, and put a stake through the heart of, one inevitable charge: There is nothing “new” in this book about the Vietnam War. What this book contains, I very much hope, is an emotional experience interwoven with established historical facts of the Vietnam War—an experience that I hope is and feels new. Let me say too that I address the historical record with great respect for the historians whose work I have read and used. I fully acknowledge that nonhistorians dwell upon historical events at their own risk. I have nevertheless attempted to read the secondary English-language literature of the war widely and carefully, though I realize that I have probably missed many important works. Vietnam is a massive topic, its history massively contended, and one could literally devote one's life to it. Encyclopedism was not my goal while researching this book.
But this is not really a book about the nation of Vietnam, or even the Vietnam War. It is, instead, a book about war's endless legacy. I did not intend to write a book about the legacy of war, but how could it have been otherwise? War is a force of influence above all else—the most purely distilled form of partisanship ever devised. Yet war's energies and dark matter are too complicated to allow anyone the certain physics of right and wrong. When war begins, leaders inevitably frown as they promise courage and bravery, guarantee tragic sacrifice, yet vow, all the same, to see it through. What any war's igniters rarely admit are the small, terrible truths that have held firm for every war ever fought, no matter how necessary or avoidable: This will be horrible, and whatever happens will scar us for decades to come. Indeed, even necessary wars can destroy the trust of a people in their leaders, just as war destroys human beings on both sides of the rifle.
War is appetitive. It devours goodwill, landscape, cultures, mothers, and fathers—before finally forcing us, the orphans, to pick up the pieces. These pages are, I hope, a few such pieces.
T.C.B.
November 28, 2005
New York City
A Brief Note on Spelling
Vietnamese words, save for those clearly borrowed from other languages (for instance, oto, or “automobile”) and a few compound-word phrases, have one syllable. Thus it is not Vietnam but Viet Nam (pronounced Vyet Nam), not Hanoi but Ha Noi, not Danang but Da Nang, not Saigon but Sai Gon—and this is not even to include the various diacritical markings that indicate the tonal emphasis of each vowel. Our familiar Western corruptions occurred during the first years of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, when newspaper headline writers smashed together alien place names in order to conserve front-page acreage. For Vietnam's most recognizable cities I have continued this somewhat embarrassing tradition and used the compounded form. For less well known cities, such as Nha Trang and Da Lat, and other Vietnamese terms, such as Viet Cong and Viet Minh, I have opted for usage appropriate to their language of origin.
ONE
The Fall
The waters returned and covered the chariots and the chariot drivers, the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not one of them remained.
—EXODUS 14:28
I
It would have been spring. The neighborhood yards still yellow and concrete hard, the side panels of the cars you pass on the way home from work spattered with arcing crusts of road salt, the big oaks and elms that loom along Lake Shore Drive throwing down long pale rows of shadow. These trees are covered with stony gray bark, their naked branches black lightning against a deepening indigo sky. Everywhere winter's grim spell still holds.
A midwestern spring at the Forty-sixth Parallel is a different sort of season than the spring one finds even five degrees lower, in Milwaukee, say, or Chicago. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula spring never truly arrives. It passes through for a few weeks, shrinks and smoothens the filthy fringes of snow that sit packed against the curbs, finishes with a fine icy sheen the misshapen islets of snow out in the yard that stubbornly refuse to melt, but spring does not arrive. It does not come. One receives only the suggestion of spring here, followed by a hot, windy summer. You are thinking of this as you circle around your huge yard (which takes up half the block), noting its lumpy archipelago of remaining snow, before finally pulling into the driveway. There is something exhausted about the way your station wagon's engine sputters and dies. For a moment you sit there in the car looking at the remaining mounds of snow. On bright days, when the sunlight angles down on the ice crystals just right, the reflection can be difficult to look at. But on this cloudy late afternoon there is but little light. Your eyes ache anyway, the silvery imminence of evening hovering above you. Where is spring? you think, now standing in your driveway, gazing upon your house, its coldly reflective windows, its closed doors. Today you have left work early and driven the long way home. It is 5 p.m. on April 29,1975.
The lights come on in the empty kitchen. You keep your hand on the circular plastic knob, fiddling with and turning the adjuster. Darker, lighter, darker. You cannot find the proper setting, going from break-room bright to dinner-party mild to opium-den dim at the speed of light. But what is the speed of darkness? The cabinetry is all chocolaty wood, the countertops a hard Formica blaze of orange, a room that seems dark even when it is blazingly illumed. At last (fuck it) you switch off the overhead light, the sound of your own heart more audible while you stand in charcoal shadow.
You stare at the kitchen table. Two ashtrays, one on each end of the table, form twin pyres of your wife Muff's lipsticked butts. An empty baby bottle, its sides still cloudy with clinging milk. A tall red, white, and blue
can of Budweiser, its top-popped aperture keyhole-shaped. You know it is urine warm and half full before you even touch it. Your live-in younger brother Paul's, no doubt. (Muff claims to see Paul only when he is “drunk, sleeping, or hung over.” He is twenty-four. What can you do?) The lazy Susan and its cargo of gift-shop jetsam, souvenirs from trips you no longer remember: expensive glass salt and pepper shakers Muff had to have, the floral-patterned porcelain sugar dish, the toothpick holder shaped like a rotund little monk, the plastic tray freighted with a yellow slab of room-temperature margarine. A neatly planed pile of mail awaits you on the table's corner. All of it adding up to life, one little corner in a seven-year repository of marriage. You do not even look through the mail.
When I asked you what this time was like, you said only, “I was a young guy, working hard. Always pissed off. Always.” You were a trust officer at the First National Bank, managing other people's money. They save up here in the woods. From the millionaire widows living in fireplace-heated homes to the couples sitting on $700,000 portfolios while driving rusty Ford pickups, you were learning all about the strange camouflage and various neuroses of rural wealth. What made many of your customers’ mattress stuffing so frustrating was that you were broke. Every morning that you parked your used Chevy station wagon beside your boss's long cream Cadillac reminded you of this. The Bissells, of course, were reputed around town to have money—how faces in Escan-aba changed when the name Bissell came flying back at them!—but over the last seven years you had watched it all go up in the low fires of your various new responsibilities.
JOHN AND JOHNO BISSELL
Broke. Such a hard, simple, declarative word. You dreamed of making $20,000 a year, three times and more your current salary. Twenty thousand dollars: the number itself was talismanic, as beautiful as a finish line. It would bandage these seven years of hemorrhaging marital wounds and keep them stanched forever. Because now things were not well. “Your mother,” you told me once, without bitterness, “wanted a better life.” Everything at this time felt to you cold and dead, as though your touch itself were warmth-draining, death-contagious. Every room of the house was dark and angry that spring, unwarmed and unloved, but there were few places for blame to gather. Nor was there any place to hide.