The Father of All Things

by Tom Bissell

  You walk through your family's ancestral seven-bedroom house looking for your wife and sons, a journey of several minutes. To many visitors, the Bissell house, one of Escanaba's biggest, always felt less like a home than a series of pastel caverns linked by massively arched throughways. You drift across the canary-wallpapered dining room (the chandelier so huge and gaudy it was vaguely embarrassing to pass beneath it), the green-carpeted living room (most of its antique furniture having not known human weight in years), and pass into the final and most spacious—the television room. The Bissell house's placement on the littoral edge of town allows the television room's four massive bay windows to look out onto Ludington Park, beyond which spans the seascape tundra of still-frozen Lake Michigan. Today the lake is a surface storm of twirling snow devils. As expected, here you find Muff and your sons. Your little sister Alicia is upstairs, in her room, listening to the Monkees (she still refuses to acknowledge that they did not play their instruments), while your brother Paul, you can guess, is out with friends, most likely attached to a keg hose.

  Muff is watching television with your son Johno, who at five resembles nothing so much as a pudgy, thin-haired Buddha. Muff looks beautiful, of course. How could she not? She once bested her classmate Farrah Fawcett in a junior high beauty contest in Corpus Christi, Texas. The hair your wife has bleached platinum blond every week for the last decade achieves gravity-defying proportions, a hair-spray skyscraper. She wears slightly too much powder blue eye shadow that is carefully matched to the color of her thin turtleneck sweater. She holds Johno on her knee, lightly bouncing him—though he is too big for this—her long hard white fingernails mildly alarming whenever she pushes his hair across his forehead. She looks at you and nods hello, already expecting the worst.

  At the room's far edge, across a bay of orange carpet, almost swallowed by her recliner, Aunt Grace sits knitting. She is white-haired and thick-calved, wearing big nunnish brown shoes, a solid blue dress, and a red shawl so tasseled and incomplete-looking your initial thought is that she is knitting it upon her own shoulders. You know that amid the needles’ steady clicking Grace is waiting for the inevitable flare of discord between you and Muff, whereupon she will quietly stand to leave and, later in the evening, offer neutral comfort to you both. With age comes wisdom: the sort of bromide one hears all the time, even as less and less clear evidence seems to support it. Grace is welcome proof that—at least sometimes, in some people—with age comes wisdom. But Grace is not much help with what vexes you today. Her own husband Herb died of a heart attack in his forties, still wracked by the horrors of World War I's battlefields. Herb never spoke of the war to Grace, and thus, in your mind, she never truly knew the man she loved. War, then. Always war. In regard to the war, your war, you could very much use some human wisdom right now. You are thirty-three years old, and the events of the last few weeks have not made much sense. Or rather, the events have made sense, but nothing else has.

  MUFF AND JOHNO

  Vietnam is a dream to you. It has been eight years since you took in its scents, felt its Asian sunlight on your white skin. The war comes to you now not as whole memory but in pieces and fragments as ragged and drifty as ash. Up half the night, turning in the wet-flannel heat, checking on sentries, checking on your gunner placements. Up early in the morning for patrols, still hot. Or sleeping all day for night patrols, hot again, these night patrols the worst, always the worst, feeling like four-hour-long panic attacks enacted within a nightmare. Your clothes rotting, your feet rotting. The ankle sores that never healed and remained as bright and wet as fresh raspberries. The sweat that was like another layer of clothing. Your smell, that deep swampy smell of your body. The mold you picked from between your toes and flicked lightheartedly at whoever was nearest. The smell of twenty Marines’ unwashed asses and unbrushed teeth all around you, the olfactory orchestra of the jungle itself, the warm, buttery smell of a cleaned Ml4, the firecracker stench of gunfire. You still smell it, sometimes, when you wake up sweating, Muff having been driven to the couch hours before by your kicking. You smell it when the remnant of the malaria banished to the depths of your cells catches you with a chill that almost takes you to your knees, when your limbs thrum with a ghostly soreness, when the shrapnel wound on your neck glows with a sudden inner fire.

  You left Vietnam in late 1966, a time when the word “quagmire” was just abandoning Rogefs as its most natural habitat. The war then was still tenable, winnable—or so it was thought. But now it was la fin de la guerre, the real fin, not the “peace with honor” that extricated the Americans in 1973, only two years ago, but the final campaign. A headline you saw only seven days ago: HOPE THINS FOR MILLIONS ADRIFT ACROSS INDOCHINA. Your hope has thinned, too, and your very body aches of its thinning. You feel incomplete, as though within you some crucial girder of emotion has gone missing. That part of you is still in Vietnam. That part never left.

  II

  In late March 1975, the Saigon newspaper Chinh Luan published an article, now known as the “Fare Thee Well” dispatch, that had been written in the midst of fierce combat between the armies of North and South Vietnam as South Vietnam was unraveling. The author was the South Vietnamese war correspondent Nguyen Dinh Tu. Through “the outstanding initiative and very strong leadership of the United States,” Tu wrote, “the Paris Peace Agreement was signed on the 27th of January 1973 to international applause of our friends, especially in the United States, leading to ‘Peace with Honor’ in accord with the desires of former President Nixon, the present Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Congress, and the entire American people. The fact that these friends have been able to return to the warmth of their families is something for which I personally, with all my heart and soul, rejoice.” But Tu went on:

  Now, after two years of “Peace with Honor [,]” through the reports of newspapers, wire services, radio, and television all over the world, those friends are now observing the disintegration that is spreading daily across my homeland. Thousands of my country's soldiers have continued to fall throughout the two years of “Peace with Honor.” Thousands of my people, including many children, have continued to die throughout these two years of “Peace with Honor.” Hundreds of thousands of my people are homeless, hungry, cold; and furthermore and even more important, without hope, without even the dream of a life worth living for these two years of “Peace with Honor,” and for the coming days, the coming months, and perhaps even the coming years. And everyone in Vietnam, including me, my friends, we now ask ourselves, how long will the “Peace with Honor” continue, and where will it lead? … [A] 11 of my people, and I personally, have understood that our friends, especially our American friends, the American Congress and the American people … look upon the war in Vietnam from which they have drawn so far away, as if it were a nightmare that must be pushed completely away from their minds in order for them to live peacefully and happily in the warmth of their families. No one, in psychological terms or any other terms, can continue forever to retain the affection and assistance of the person next to them, be that a single person, a friendly country, or an ally in a desperate situation. The soldiers of my country, my people (please understand “people” here to mean the overwhelming majority, the poor, the war victims, and not the rich and fat minority in Saigon and a few other cities in Vietnam and in some foreign countries), and I myself, we understand all of this…. Out of a feeling of helplessness, because I cannot find any words of my own with which to express my deep gratitude and bid a respectful farewell to the allies, especially to the Americans in the United States Congress, in the United States government, to the American soldiers and the American people who cherish “Peace with Honor,” let me with a heart that is completely sincere quote a line of poetry from Lord Byron to send to all these friends:

  FARE THEE WELL! AND IF FOREVER,

  STILL, FOR EVER FARE THEE WELL.

  When the Paris Peace Agreement—officially known as the Paris Accords for Ending the War and Restoring Peace in V
ietnam—was signed in lan-uary 1973, many regarded it as the virtual surrender of South Vietnam to the Communists. Nguyen Van Thieu, South Vietnam's tough, soft-spoken, intelligent, perpetually dapper, and moderately crooked president at the time of the accords’ signing, certainly never saw the terms imposed by the Paris Accords as anything but “an inhumane act by an inhumane ally,” as he later put it. He even wept in Henry Kissinger's presence when shown an early version of the agreement. While the accords’ terms were still being debated in March 1972, North Vietnam launched its biggest offensive in four years—a series of attacks almost Swiss in their synchronization. Several tank-backed battalions of North Vietnamese soldiers charged southward over the Seventeenth Parallel, which had divided North Vietnam from South Vietnam since 1954. They were quickly joined in battle by the Viet Cong. (“Viet Cong,” from “Viet Nam Cong San,” or “Vietnamese Communists,” was invented in the mid-1950s by either the South Vietnamese government or its American advisers—accounts differ—in order to blanket the resistance movement with purely Communist motives. Viet Cong also refers only to insurgency forces operating within South Vietnam; the Viet Cong's proper name was the National Liberation Front, or NLF. The People's Army of Vietnam, or PAVN, refers to North Vietnam's professional soldiers. The groups were in league but not always mind-melded, as was often assumed at the time.) The North's surprise Easter Offensive was finally broken by a fearsome use of American airpower officially known as Linebacker I.

  The North was not only plotting offensives and being bombed while it contemplated the terms of the Paris Accords; it was also being prodded toward the signing table by its putative allies the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. Both nations were sick of shoveling rubles and yuan into the bottomless furnace of the Vietnam War and were eager to follow President Richard Nixon's lead along the first tenuous cobblestones of detente. If the South felt abandoned by the United States, the North felt in some ways equally abandoned by its Soviet and Chinese allies, both now publicly softening their views of the West. To have been a Vietnamese of any political inclination during the early 1970s was to have felt a dire sense of sudden, unfamiliar friendlessness.

  What terms, then, did the Paris Accords impose upon the long-fighting nations of North and South Vietnam? Then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger convinced North Vietnam's chief negotiator, Le Due Tho, to release U.S. prisoners of war in both North Vietnam and Laos and to withdraw all PAVN troops from Laos. The North also agreed to the establishment of an Administration of National Concord (“whatever that meant,” Kissinger notes humanely in his memoirs), to be set up by the Thieu regime, and a coalition of southern Communists called the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), which had recently been known as the Viet Cong and whose negotiation duties would largely consist of dismantling Thieu's regime. Two of these concessions (those of the American POWs and Laos) were of little use to Thieu, one (the PAVN withdrawal from Laos) was helpful, and one (the coalition government) reduced Thieu to rage. Partaking of any coalition government at all with Communists had been the most signal of Thieu's “Four No's,” a public relations campaign the Saigon regime launched shortly before the Paris talks began. The three remaining forbidden contingencies were (1) no negotiation with the Communists, (2) no Communist activity in South Vietnam, and (3) no territory belonging to South Vietnam to be ceded to the Communists.

  What follows is the buffet of allowances from which Thieu and his countrymen were forced by Kissinger to dine. While the North pledged that its armies would vacate the parts of South Vietnam controlled by the South's Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), it was allowed to retain up to 145,000 troops in all areas “liberated” by the North and NLF, which meant a hostile standing army in South Vietnamese territory and, in effect, placed the NLF on equal political footing with the South Vietnamese government. Meanwhile, the South was not allowed to increase its ARVN troop strength and was forbidden to accept additional weapons from the United States, except as replacements for weapons falling under the forgiving designation of “worn-out” or “damaged.” Any and all American offices and military bases throughout South Vietnam, with the exception of the U.S. Defense Attache Office (known as “Pentagon East”) and the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, were to be shuttered. The South would additionally have to honor and obey an independent international coalition that would oversee “free and democratic” elections in South Vietnam.

  President Thieu did receive various sweeteners, secretly and otherwise. For instance, the leases of American military installations were quickly transferred to South Vietnamese holders to allow their continued operation, and several billion dollars’ worth of “replacement” weapons were speedily shipped to South Vietnam from Taiwan, South Korea, and Israel, an operation known as Enhance Plus. This gave South Vietnam, quite suddenly, the fourth largest air force in the world. Most important, in one of three private letters Nixon had written Thieu, the U.S. president promised his Vietnamese counterpart that the United States “will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.”

  Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Due Tho were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for coming to terms in Paris. Only Kissinger accepted the prize, though he did not attend the ceremony for fear of attracting protestors. Le Due Tho proceeded from the sensible premise that the only peace earned at Paris had been for the United States. He still had a war to fight. Tho would later be central in urging the North Vietnamese to proceed with the final, all-out offensive on South Vietnam.

  Even though the South's army, which numbered almost one million soldiers, had been augmented by two decades of American aid and the North's army had been literally decimated after its surprise offensive of 1972, it was clear to most that the Paris Accords seriously undermined Thieu's government. Without huge tactical support from the United States, the South's armies were in most cases haplessly commanded, dangerously underpaid, and utterly corrupted. Not a few ARVN soldiers took to the old practice of selling arms and rice to the Communists to support their families. In other regions, ARVN officers demanded payment to authorize medevacs for the wounded and outright bribes to call in artillery strikes for their pinned-down comrades. However weakened, cautious, and hungry, the North's army and the NLF were growing in strength and determination in the early 1970s.

  Not surprisingly, the Paris Accords’ cease-fire was quickly broken by both sides, nullifying the promised elections that would unify Vietnam. President Thieu called this outbreak of new hostilities “the Third Indochina War,” but for the first time in modern history the people of Vietnam were fighting without the direct presence of foreign intermediaries. Within a year of the Paris Accords’ signing, the South's army had lost 40 percent of its soldiers to desertion and death, and, in the words of the historian Larry H. Addington, “the corruption so endemic to South Vietnam had caused much of the war materiel that the Americans had lavished on the [South] to be drained away to improper uses.” This finally amounted to $200 million of “misplaced” and “lost” equipment and weapons. President Nixon's May 1974 request to set the ceiling of aid to South Vietnam at $1.6 billion was rebuffed by Congress. Nixon resigned three months later, to the shock of President Thieu, who had been assured that nothing amid Watergate's circus of illegality was an impeachable offense. The House-Senate conference committee that agreed to cap aid to South Vietnam at $1 billion gave Nixon a last kick by lowering the amount to $700 million.

  Arguing for a return to the “revolutionary violence” of the late 1960s, North Vietnam's hard-liners advocated a full assault against the weakening Thieu regime. As the North's General Vo Nguyen Giap later wrote, “our people now had the historic opportunity to liberate South Vietnam totally…. [T]he time had come when the enemy was facing complete failure while we were in a position to win complete victory.” On January 7, 1975, the North Vietnamese, having patiently planned their move, finally attacked the South in force and quickly took the province of Phuoc Long, which was located a mere
fifty miles from Saigon's suburbs. This most flagrant violation of the Paris Accords so far was also “a carefully calculated experiment,” in the words of one PAVN major general, to see whether President Gerald Ford would reengage the United States in the conflict. The collapse of Phuoc Long province was not a staggering military loss by any means, but it did demonstrate to the North Vietnamese that the “massive and brutal retaliation” Nixon had promised President Thieu would simply never occur. Nixon himself was on his way to the memoir-enabling sunshine of San Clemente, California, and Ford's war powers had undergone congressional vasectomy.

  Many South Vietnamese units initially fought well during the North's 1975 offensive, but when it became clear to the South's people that no emergency aid was forthcoming from the United States, the ARVN's morale, fragile at the best of times, began a last disintegration. “There was a kind of sickness that infected them,” one ARVN general later said of his fellow soldiers to the historian Larry Engelmann, “the sickness of an idea…. They wanted to depend on America, and when they could not depend on America they ran away.”

  On March 10, after sending out numerous false radio messages and leaking decoy troop movement schedules, North Vietnam marched 10,000 soldiers down the newly paved Ho Chi Minh Trail into a region of South Vietnam known as the Central Highlands, a strategically invaluable area due to its miles of elevated ground and the terminus of the Communist supply network that smuggled men and weapons into South Vietnam. For the North, the once-terrifying ordeal of journeying down the Ho Chi Minh Trail—a veritable autobahn now that it was no longer being cratered by American B-52s—was no more. Furthermore, the enemy the North met in the Central Highlands was galaxies from its ideal fighting condition. A large percentage of the South's soldiers in the Central Highlands were badly undersupplied (there are numerous stories of ARVN soldiers scrounging in the dirt for unspent rifle rounds and buying grenades with their own money) and, by one account, strung out on heroin, which had become newly affordable once South Vietnam was emptied of America's lotus-eating soldiers in 1973.