The Father of All Things

by Tom Bissell

  Within two days of its offensive in the Central Highlands, the North captured the important mountain town of Buon Me Thuot and sealed off the majority of the ARVN's supply routes in the region. On March 14, a straw-grabbing President Thieu ordered an ARVN retreat from the Highlands, which he claimed was part of a strategy to “lighten the top so as to keep the bottom.” Thieu's decision was so militarily baffling that many of the North's generals feared it was a trap. They were not the only ones caught unawares: the total evacuation of an important area under fierce enemy attack was unforeseen even by Thieu's most craven generals.

  The ARVN retreat, which under the best of circumstances would have taken months to plan, instead got under way in hours. President Thieu's hope was that the Central Highlands’ retreating divisions would be met and reinforced at the coastal city of Tuy Hoa, whereupon some would turn around to wage a counteroffensive and others would form a heavily armed human moat around the Mekong Delta and Saigon. The retreating ARVN columns never reached their destination of Tuy Hoa. These soldiers had one route of escape from the Central Highlands— the thin, badly paved, and heavily mined Route 7B, an old logging road that had hitherto been abandoned as unfit for transport. When Thieu's withdrawal order reached the ears of the region's general populace, riots erupted. Soon Route 7B was jammed with 60,000 troops and 400,000 civilians. An ARVN colonel later described to Engelmann how the tanks and armored personnel carriers and trucks had been covered with desperate refugees and members of many soldiers’ families: “Sometimes they would fall off, and the convoy kept moving and they screamed and were crushed…. It was a nightmare.” Yet it got worse. Some ARVN soldiers in this “convoy of tears” (a phrase coined by the war correspondent Nguyen Dinh “Fare Thee Well” Tu), driven mad by fear and hunger, began killing and raping people. South Vietnamese A-37s accidentally bombed one retreating ARVN armored unit that had radioed for air support. When it rained, the road became a river of boot-swallowing, tire-stopping mud. By the time the North's armies reached the bogged-down, civilian-hampered battalions of ARVN soldiers, there was open revolt. Three quarters of the 25,000 troops were wiped out. The few who escaped fled to the sea, and the ARVN general responsible for transmitting Thieu's withdrawal order soon shot himself.

  A North Vietnamese spy in South Vietnam's Central Intelligence headquarters now began to provide his unwitting comrades with false maps indicating the Communists’ attack plan. The air advantage the South had long held, already sorely weakened by a lack of American aid, was now fully obliterated. Empty forests were bombed as the North's untouched armies gobbled up South Vietnam's countryside. The coastal cities of the South began to fall in mid-March. The city of Hue then fell on March 24, Danang on March 30. All “nonessential” American personnel were secretly told by the U.S. Embassy to begin their evacuation the next day.

  By the end of March, eight provinces had fallen to the Communists. The beginning of April was no better. In its first days Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, and Da Lat fell into PAVN and NLF hands. Thanks to looting ARVN soldiers, Nha Trang burned for almost a week before being formally occupied. Early April also saw the attempted assassination of President Thieu when a South Vietnamese F-5A jet, feigning engine trouble, broke away from its formation and dropped a bomb on the Presidential Palace in Saigon. The F-5A's U.S.-trained pilot, Nguyen Thanh Trung, was a long-scheming defector to the North whose Communist father had been killed by the Saigon government years before.

  On April 4 an American cargo plane filled with hundreds of Vietnamese war orphans and various Defense Attache Office personnel left Saigon for the United States. This “orphan airlift” was the unofficial beginning of the evacuation of all Americans and those South Vietnamese particularly vulnerable to Communist charges of collaboration. Some U.S. Embassy officials in Saigon hoped that the arrival of so many Vietnamese orphans on American soil would provide a catalyst for public sympathy and win more aid for the South. But one of the plane's rear doors had not been properly latched and was torn from its hinges shortly after takeoff. The C-5A Galaxy (then the world's largest aircraft) crash-landed in a rice paddy outside Saigon, killing 135 and making the orphan airlift, at that point, the second worst disaster in aviation history. More than half of the dead were orphans, and most did not die during the crash itself but drowned while trapped in their seats. Those who survived, in the words of one rescuer, were “so frightened they couldn't even cry” and had to be hosed down to wash the mud from their bodies. On April 10, President Ford made a final attempt to convince Congress to appropriate $1 billion in emergency military assistance to South Vietnam, saying in a speech before the House that the “situation in South Vietnam … has reached a critical phase … and the time is very short.” At least two members of Congress stood and walked out in the middle of Ford's speech in what was (then) an unprecedented display of contempt for a sitting president.

  III

  I have before me a letter, undated. My mother, who gave it to me, says my father probably wrote it to her in the mid-1970s, when things between my parents, who divorced in 1977, were especially toxic. The letter is handwritten and badly folded (it looks like a blindfolded attempt at a paper airplane) and stained mysteriously pink along its top edge. But the ink still leaps off the page, as bright and resonant as a week-old tattoo. Obviously written after an argument, it reads:

  My Dear Sweetheart,

  Muffin, this is no poem, it can't be. I want you but you're too beautifully asleep. Muffin, you look so pretty tonight! I love you so much—so very much.

  I honestly don't know what I would do, or where I would be, without you. Thank you for being here—with me; for now and forever.

  The wind is blowing—I can hear the waves crashing onto the beach. In a way it reminds me of us. The storm comes but always you and the calm settles, both upon nature and us.

  My darling, I love you and need you. Tonight you're in a flat calm and you're the most peaceful, beautiful thing I have ever seen. I have lived, died, laughed, cried, reveled, and moped with you for years now. I want to continue to do so for two thousand more.

  I love you, Muffin.

  Any glimpse we get of our parents prior to our incubation is liable to haunt and astound. It is hard to accept that your parents were once young, uncertain people, driven by passions and miscalculations. The first time I read this letter of my father's, it sat me down with damp, scalding eyes. This was not a sepia snapshot of two smiling strangers in superannuated clothing who somewhat resembled my parents. This was a narrow psychic tunnel into the subterranea of their marriage.

  What was it about this letter that hit me so roughly? Perhaps the weird personal recognition I found in it. My father's letter does not sound terribly unlike the gut-torn missives I have written to the objects of my own reckless love. Or perhaps it was the discovery that these two human beings who treated each other so awfully when I was growing up once loved each other so much, and so indisputably.

  I was lucky. I was three when my parents divorced, and they wound up living only blocks from each other. Unlike the children of most divorced parents, any questions of custody were for my brother and me ridiculous. I am not even sure which of my parents was granted custody (what an unfriendly word!) or what the terms of visitation were. My brother and I simply drifted back and forth between parents, as calculating as thieves. My clearest memories of my mother and father's early interaction are of my father standing out in the cold of my stepfather's house, waiting while we put on our shoes or finished breakfast, so he could take us to church. My mother would not allow my father inside the house. She would not even answer the door or speak to him. “Your father's here,” she would say coolly when the doorbell rang. When I opened the door, my father's expression was always the same, every morning, a host of multitudes. Embarrassment, pain, stoicism, anger— somehow his long, thin face contained all of them. His hands would invariably be stuffed in his pockets, his hair superbly combed. He would smile when he saw us and never said a word about having had t
o wait outside. Something about the way he stood out there in the dark cold— he seemed so wronged—made me unfairly blame everything that had gone bad between my parents on my mother. I was probably twelve or thirteen before she finally let him into the house. This letter of my father's provided my first real glimpse of the invisible wreckage that lay beneath those awkward mornings.

  After Vietnam, my father wound up on a military base in Beaufort, South Carolina, where he traded his rifle for a clipboard and ran a motor transport and aviation gas company for the Marines, garrison duty he describes as “absolutely, totally boring.” But soon after arriving in Beaufort he met the daughter of Colonel Frank C. Thomas, chief of staff for the First Marine Air Wing, who had been in and out of Vietnam since 1964 and who was known to everyone as Colonel T. My father claims not to remember the first time he met my mother. If what my mother says is true, it is little wonder. She met him at the Marine Corps's Officers’ Club in Beaufort. “He was obnoxious, drunk, and crude,” my mother reports. “I dated a bunch of other guys before I finally went out with him. I guess he wouldn't take no for an answer. He kept bugging me. But he was funny. I loved his sense of humor—when he was sober. He was so dark when he was drunk, but when he was sober he was the most wonderful man. He also had a lot of integrity. I liked that.”

  They married in 1967. My mother was nineteen, my father twenty-five and still limping, in every sense, from injuries he incurred in Vietnam. My father's father had died several years before, and his mother had struggled with, and after a stay in the Mayo Clinic was thought to have beaten, tongue cancer. Nonetheless, my grandmother was concerned enough about her health to have sat down with my mother shortly before she married my father. Of that day my mother particularly remembers the bright red scarves worn by my grandmother that hid gruesome surgical scars on her throat. My grandmother, after some general overtures, made my then-teenage mother promise that, if anything happened to her, she would raise her children Paul and Alicia, aged sixteen and twelve. My mother remembers feeling overcome by a great gust of shocked concern, then blurting, “But you're fine now!”

  ALICIA AND JOHN BISSELL, SR.

  “All the same,” my grandmother said, looking evenly at my mother, “can you promise me that you will do this?” My mother, still stunned, promised my grandmother that she would. Colonel T., at the same time, made my father promise him two things: that he would never quit the Marine Corps, and, more important, that he would never take his little girl, a true daughter of the South, back north to Michigan with him. My father, then up for major and beginning seriously to plan for his career in the Marine Corps, made these twin promises to Colonel T. with equally puzzled surety.

  Thirty days after my parents were married, my grandmother died of the cancer that had unexpectedly spread to her lymph nodes. She was fifty. My nineteen-year-old mother found herself the custodian of two children only a little younger than she. While her promise shakily held, my father's was instantly broken. Over near-unanimous resistance from his fellow jarheads, Colonel T., and his new wife, my father resigned his Marine Corps commission and moved my mother to his hometown of Escanaba, Michigan, to take care of his brother and sister, whom he did not want to uproot. The move especially devastated my mother, a woman who proudly flew a Confederate flag off her front porch throughout my childhood. The sum of my mother's worldly experience to this point, other than partying her way out of the University of South Carolina, was the South and the Marine Corps, and now both had been cleaved from her. There was no anodyne for this severance, only the cauterizing assurance of the man she loved. But she loved him, I suspect, and in no small part, because he was a Marine. She once admitted to me that her fondest wish as a young woman was to be a Marine Corps wife. The seasonal balls, the crispness of the uniforms, the hot, orderly calm of military-base housing in the great American South: this is what she knew, all she wanted, and now it was gone.

  Colonel T. was especially hard on my father about his decision to leave the Marine Corps. A letter from December 14, 1967, addressed to “Capt. & Mrs. John Bissell,” has my grandfather telling my father:

  Quite frankly, I am not surprised by your actions. Do not misunderstand me, I am not speaking of potential, I think you have all the potential in the world to make the Marine Corps a career[,] I just don't think you have or have ever had the basic motivation and understanding of the requirements to do so…. My only concern is your and my daughter's stability and happiness. I expect you to provide stability, responsibility and maturity of an adult male regardless of your vocation. And the best way not to do this is to live your life like a feather on the wind, blown in whatever direction happens to offer the path of least resistance and appears most desirable. I have seen too many attempt this little game and then seen them at age 45-50 still looking for the career that will give them what they want…. John, I have known you a year now and have observed a complete switch in thought. To be able to change courses is fine, it indicates flexibility and adaptability, so long as it's based on logical rational reasoning and all factors and facts…. But a constant hopping from one field to another that looks greener indicates only insecurity, lack of self-confidence and a tendency to wallow in self-pity.

  This letter was written to my parents from Danang in coastal Vietnam, a city referred to by Colonel T. as “the pearl of the Orient.” It ends with this: “Do not worry about the rockets. They pose practically no danger and if they hit you, you are either stupid or extremely unlucky, neither of which you can do a thing about. So if the poor little blighters want to lug them 400 miles on their back, for two seconds of whoosh, then I feel sorry for them…. So don't worry about me, I'm living high on the hog and am quite secure. Like a bug.” I imagine that my grandfather, a thoughtful analyst of military history, was familiar with Dien Bien Phu. This horrific, weeks-long final battle of the First Indochina War in 1954 had seen the “poor little blighters” of the Viet Minh dragging nearly eighty antiaircraft guns for two months through mountainous jungle in their triumphant effort to overwhelm the supremely confident French Expeditionary Corps, whose French, Vietnamese, Moroccan, and Algerian soldiers were dug tick-deep into the tactically worthless encampment of Dien Bien Phu. While the men and women of the Viet Minh hauled pieces of these one- and two-ton armaments on old carts and bicycles through the forest, this is what they sang: “The mountains are steep, but the determination in our hearts is higher than mountains./The chasms are deep and dark, but what chasm is as deep as our hatred?” Two seconds of whoosh, indeed.

  I never knew my grandfather. I imagine that Colonel T. and I would have disagreed on many things, possibly everything, but from reading his letters I can discern an acute intelligence. This moves and saddens me, because it is intelligence in the service of the same blindness that in Vietnam shut the eyes of so many men. From a letter to my mother and father of October 1967: “Well here I am, another war, the same stupid faces with different names…. Things have changed a great deal since the last time I was out here. At least there are a helluva lot more Marines. In fact the place is fairly breathing with them. Lots of traffic and lots of gooks, on bicycles, water buffalo and bare feet…. It's interesting now, lohn, in the way everything is so closely tied together and the fantastic response time that we are now capable of in all kinds of situations.”

  COLONEL T.

  What the U.S. military was capable of seemed markedly less wondrous to Colonel T. only a year later: “I suspect the little brown gooks will continue to get pretty mouthy until the election in the U.S. is settled, but now while the idiots are mouthing off they will respond in any way they can … to influence American opinion in ways they think will help them most. So I don't look for any real cool off on their part, they will continue to kick up dust and a lot of people will still have to die. Mostly gooks but each time it does cost us Marines. I wish I could figure out a way it could end but I can't.” On February 9, 1968, shortly after the North launched the Tet Offensive, the suddenness and ferocity of which stu
nned everyone in the United States from LBJ down, Colonel T. (who by this point, according to family legend, had an NLF bounty on his head) wrote again from Danang. “I seem to have gotten a tad behind in my writing but I have been out on some rather sporty evenings lately,” he begins, jauntily alluding to the fact that during Tet, Danang had been hit repeatedly by 122 mm NLF rockets. After some irritated analysis of the surprise offensive, Colonel T. begins to reveal what one can only surmise is his growing despair about the war:

  I do not think there is enough natural drive and courage to do much except talk. Not enough of us understand the problem and of those who do too many I'm afraid do not have the gumption or nerve to do anything about it. It takes an awful long and completely unselfish view to lay it on the line now for the benefit of coming generations. It's much easier, and safer, to, a la the hippies, only consider your own happiness in your life, dodge all responsibility and let those coming later try to take care of the situation. But I really don't believe that this mental and moral condition will apply in the U.S. too much longer, because as I've said before I think the generation starting about with [his son] Bo's time will revert, and from them will come those archers of the El Dorado who will stand tall and strong among all men and sit coequal and in peerage with Crockett, Washington, Lee, Sherman, and Jackson.