The Father of All Things

by Tom Bissell

  Two weeks after Colonel T. wrote these words, Walter Cronkite, on live television, publicly opposed the Vietnam War for the first time by saying, “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate…. The only rational way out… will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people.” Many of the proudest sons of the System, not only my grandfather and Cronkite but Lyndon lohnson himself (“If I lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America”), could no longer abide the wasteful, destructive path upon which the System had confidently placed itself, only to be strangled by the vines of Vietnam.

  My grandfather's casual use of “gooks,” his dismissal of hippies, and his odd placement of Davy Crockett along the mantelpiece of American military history all suggest that Colonel T. was a man of the South, and a product of Marine Corps thinking, in many if not most ways. He was also, by all accounts, a profoundly honest and decent man. As my father once told me, Colonel T.’ s formidable sense of ethics had led him to the professional Waterloo of opposing a new plane the Air Force was attempting “to cram down the Marines’ throat.” The guilty plane (“one of the Fs”) had been designed for ground-based use and was thus too heavy for aircraft-carrier landings. But warlocks in Air Force Research and Development insisted the plane's weight would not compromise its performance. Colonel T. disagreed and effectively killed the plane's deployment. “Some of the generals and admirals never forgave him,” my father told me. “That was big money. When you get up in the armed forces, any rank above colonel is the result of politics. From colonel on only the politicians win.” Colonel T. thus never became General T., a rank many of his friends and acquaintances had long anticipated for him. He made his embattled return home from Vietnam in 1969. In March 1970 he wrote my mother to wish “my little blonde girl a happy 21.… Age is turning out to be a really relative thing. I know that I'm getting older rather fast but so far I can't find very many things that it affects. I really don't feel any different now than I did when I was 21.” Five months later my grandfather died in his sleep of a heart attack. Within a few weeks occurred the one thing Colonel T. had been most looking forward to, the upcoming event he mentions in every letter: his first grandson, my brother, was born.

  My mother did not take his death well. Her mother took it even worse, and within months she moved in with my mother and father in Escanaba. What followed my spectacularly southern grandmother's widowed arrival in one of Michigan's snowiest redoubts is among my family a matter of considerable omertà. Put simply, my grandmother and my father did not get along. Put perhaps more simply yet, my grandmother would not have pissed on my father if he were on fire. My grandmother was once a promising Hollywood ingenue—she very nearly married the actor lackie Cooper—and like most of the women in her line (my mother included) was extraordinarily beautiful and emotionally extravagant. The very few people my grandmother's considerable powers of emotional seduction proved unable to win were no doubt regarded by her with frustrated suspicion. But my father did something far worse than fail to succumb to my grandmother's Division One charms: he married a southern woman's child, a crime for which there is no easy forgiveness.

  PRETTY GRANDMA

  Moreover, losing her husband so early and unexpectedly could not have been easy. As a southern military wife, my grandmother had little to prepare her for life alone. Midwestern small towns are trying homes even for those of us who love them; to have been transplanted to such a place in a state of irreparable grief must have been dreadful. But my grandmother was almost surreally vain, forbidding, for instance, her grandchildren from calling her “grandmother,” the existential implications of which upset her. “PG,” or “Pretty Grandma,” was what we came up with in its stead. This lovely human orchid was now quite far from her steamy native soil and many admirers, and was cast instead to the affections of the unlettered, dipthong-shunning rubes of the high rural North. She lasted in Michigan only a few years, partly because of a many-thousand-dollar loan my father made to her, which she neglected to repay (or, eventually, remember). By the the early 1970s, when she left Escanaba for Los Angeles, where she lived until the months before her death in 1989, my parents’ marriage had taken on enough emotional bilge to capsize it.

  Nowadays even to bring up the matter of my grandmother's Michigan sojourn with either of my parents—as I recently did when I came across a letter of PCs that referred repeatedly to “Sean,” to whom my mother had, apparently, given birth—is to splash kerosene all over smoldering deposits of resentment. So who is “Sean”? “Sean” is what my grandmother called my brother John for months after his birth. (“I will get off a present for Sean this week. What a smile that boy has!”) John, not coincidentally, is also my father's name. PCs insistence upon “Sean” continued until my mother finally caved in and gave John Clement Bissell II a nickname: not Sean but “Johno,” use of which my grandmother cheerfully took up. As did, for whatever reason, my father. In the end, my parents never really recovered from my grandmother's stay with them. Their marriage was nudged ever closer to the chasm.

  Sometimes I wonder if when my father looked at my mother he saw PG—as if that would provide some causal explanation for the death of their marriage. The women looked startlingly alike, and not in the watered-down manner in which children usually resemble their parents. Their resemblance was rather a matter of photocopied enzymes, laboratory surreality, clone magick. They both had the same disarming smile, with its perfect teeth-to-gums ratio; the same elaborate coif of unnaturally white blond hair; the same dollishly too-big head, thin though fit limbs, and wonderfully trim figure. They even shared the same aura, some faded Old South glow that a mere parasol or colonnaded backdrop could have reenergized.

  I can only wonder what you were thinking when you sat down on the couch beside Muff in late April 1975. The helpless anger you felt—the war, your marriage, the money you had lost to PG—I know about from having talked to you. But where did all the rage you were feeling go? In your anger, of course, you were far from alone.

  The orphan airlift crash had benumbed everyone still paying attention to Vietnam. The pointless deaths of so many innocents took the more general pointlessness of the war and italicized it, capitalized it, underlined it in flame. Combat deaths, even defeats, meant something. But a plane crash in a war zone was barren of meaning. On the news you had glimpsed footage of the burned and muddy little bodies covered by Red Cross blankets—and some part of your mind neatly switched Vietnam off. You stopped caring. But now, three weeks later, you find you do care again, care deeply and totally, and you simply cannot believe what has been brought down upon Vietnam during the three-week leave of your concern.

  Yesterday you read a piece in the Chicago Tribune written by a journalist who had previously served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam. He wrote of staring at a map of Vietnam: “places marked in grease pencil and the names of certain places underlined…. Hoi-Vuc, Binh Thai, Hill 270 and Charlie Ridge and Purple Heart Trail. It was difficult to accept the idea that they were now in enemy hands.” How difficult it was to accept this. The roads down which you had once commanded convoys are now the parade grounds of whole divisions of North Vietnamese armor. The thatched huts you had often held off your men from burning—how tender your heart went when confronted by the peasants of Vietnam—now happily fly the red, blue, and yellow flag of the NLF, the Viet Cong. Saigon itself is about to fall. On the radio during the ride home from work you learned that, a few hours ago, the American evacuation was completed. The latest predictions are that the city will not last the day. You stare at the television with Muff and Johno next to you. What is on is not of interest. Nothing is of any interest. Your reddened, open eyes see nothing, and your ears are immune to all sound but the black throb of your thoughts.

  You are thinking, What a horrendous, lost effort. What, you wonder, will happen to your South Vietnamese friends? Not the cowards who have been losing the war faster than the North can win it but the ARVN Marines and Special Fo
rces commandos who shared with you their fears of the Communists. These men had lost fathers and uncles to the Communist slaughter in Hue. Their cousins and grandparents had evaporated during the North's murderous land reform campaigns of the 1950s. You know that these men, and their families, will pay in blood for this day. As you stand and make your way to the humming couch-sized television, you feel at your core a great windy emptiness. You turn the television's knob, cycling through the same thirteen channels, hoping one of the networks has broken into regularly scheduled programming with a special report from Vietnam. Nothing. Nothing, nothing. Sometimes over the last few days the screen has been filled with All in the Family and sometimes with the nightmare of collapsing South Vietnam as narrated by Walter Cronkite. Coverage from South Vietnam has been like video incoming: upsetting, irregular, bracketed by a kind of strangely attentive silence. All the people at your bank claim to be unable to watch the news when Vietnam fills their screens. Too painful, they say. But it is all you want to watch. Or perhaps you want your pain to be everyone's.

  IV

  To say that this or that city fell to the Communists on such and such a date cannot begin to encapsulate the bedlam that was South Vietnam in the spring of 1975. Colonel T.’ s old coastal haunt of Danang is a case in tragically awful point. A month before it was taken over, Danang's streets were barricaded, curfewed, and quiet; a nervy, impotent vigilance had taken root in every household. Many in Danang took to watching the sea, not out of any expectation of rescue—most realized they were too unconnected for such an exalted fate—but rather out of simple longing for its blue vastidity of potential escape. (Many Vietnamese would try to escape by sea; many who did so died—of thirst, disease, starvation, drowning, tiger sharks, and something as sixteenth century as pirate attack.) By the time March literally and figuratively reached its ides, 30,000 PAVN soldiers were closing in on the city, and the first of an eventual million refugees had floated into Danang and transformed its shatteringly beautiful beaches and Buddhist temples into shantytowns. Some of the traffic jams into the city—containing “cars, jeeps, trucks, buses, motorbikes, bicycles, pushcarts … literally anything that can roll,” one American journalist observed—were ten miles long, making it difficult if not impossible for ARVN forces to move about the region and redeploy as battlefield circumstances dictated.

  On March 19, President Thieu addressed the South Vietnamese people on national television. Although his audience did not realize it at the time, the address had been taped much earlier in the day. In an unusually steady voice, Thieu promised that the old imperial capital of Hue, then suffering rapid Communist encirclement, would be held to the last man. But Thieu had already transmitted secret orders to his generals authorizing Hue's virtual abandonment. This Thieu did partly to protect Danang and partly to transfer his best soldiers to Saigon to protect him in the increasingly likely event of a coup. Albert Francis, Danang's U.S. consul general, was asked by a visiting U.S. Embassy colleague how long he felt the city could withstand the Communists. Francis replied, “At least a month, I think.” It perhaps did not bode well that the USAID-operated hotel in Danang was called the Alamo.

  Hue fell, as expected and dreaded, on March 24. The battle at Hue, General Vo Nguyen Giap wrote, was “very quickly fought. We gave the enemy no time to organize any resistance…. So they were quickly and neatly wiped out. Our strategic offensive thus became a lightning onslaught.” By this point the PAVN divisions were traveling so fast that, as one American described it, “they couldn't keep up with their own gasoline.” The next morning several PAVN artillery shells landed in Danang's clogged city center, wounding a dozen and killing six. Following this salvo came a downpour of rockets that struck the city's ARVN military outposts. This was part of North Vietnam's “blooming lotus” tactic, whereby intentional civilian deaths were used to incite panic, which in turn allowed a city to be quickly taken over. The visiting U.S. Embassy official told by Albert Francis that Danang would last a month was forced to flee for his life less than four days after arriving.

  At 4:30 a.m. on March 28, a motor-driven barge pulled alongside Danang's U.S. Consulate, located on the Han River. The plan was to ship out of the city as many Americans and politically imperiled Vietnamese as quietly and secretly as possible. The street on which the consulate building was located had been blocked off, but the Vietnamese asleep along the nearby docks woke up and panicked. Within minutes the barge was under siege by as many as 5,000 terrified Vietnamese. David Butler's The Fall of Saigon tells us what happened next:

  Then people started tossing small children from the pier up onto the barge. Some missed, the children falling into the black water between the dock and the barge, which rolled with the wakes of other traffic on the river and the surges of the several thousand people on board.

  At five-thirty, there was a rush of ARVN troops. From the shore [U.S. Consul General Albert] Francis ordered the barge to depart.

  But … the other Americans on board were unable to free a thick rope that ran from a bitt on the barge down to the dock. And the Vietnamese mob on the dock was not about to free the cable on that end. In fact, lithe young men used it to scramble up onto the barge.

  Without realizing what he was doing, the captain of the tug let the barge drift back into the dock. The men scrambling up the rope like monkeys were crushed. The tug strained to break the rope. More young men and boys clambered up the rope. The barge swung back toward the pier and they were killed…. The ghastly scenario was played out twice more and then something finally gave way and they were free and that particular roundelay of death ended.

  In the chaos, hundreds of Danang's consulate workers and CIA informants and their families were abandoned.

  In Saigon the news from Danang, essentially a second capital in terms of its military and economic significance, was grimly received. It in fact threatened to unravel the quickly dwindling remainder of South Vietnam still controlled by Saigon. The U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, had for the last several weeks been attempting to preserve a sense of calm among U.S. officials and South Vietnamese. He has since been both loathed and admired, but Martin faced one of the least enviable situations in the history of U.S. diplomacy, and widespread panic was never more than a spark away from ignition. One of the last issues of Stars and Stripes to be published in Vietnam, for instance, carried a screaming headline promising the slaughter of “AT LEAST A MILLION” South Vietnamese if the North triumphed. Martin kept a fragile but certain calm in the last months and weeks largely by secrecy and studied, quotidian ceremony. The U.S. deputy ambassador, Wolfgang Lehmann, later recalled to Larry Engelmann that Martin “did things like keeping all our pictures hanging on the walls [of the embassy], because the moment you start packing—’ Oh, the Deputy Ambassador is packing up!’ —spreads like wildfire.”

  Previously the U.S. ambassador to Thailand and Italy, Graham Martin replaced Ellsworth Bunker as ambassador to South Vietnam in June 1973, despite having never passed the Foreign Service exam. Vietnam had come to Martin long before he came to Vietnam: his helicopter-pilot nephew Glen, whom Martin had adopted, was slain during some of Vietnam's earliest fighting. The war was a highly personal matter to Martin, and he once attacked The New York Times journalist David K. Shipler in a blistering 4,600-word cable to the State Department wherein he all but called Shipler a Communist propagandist. Many of the journalists in Vietnam returned such antipathetic favor, especially when Martin routinely split hairs over the number of Communists and political prisoners held, and often tortured, by the Thieu government. While Amnesty International put the number at 200,000, Martin maintained that the number was more like 30,000. Martin made things no better for himself when he attempted to illume the bright side of Thieu's corrupt government by explaining, “A little corruption oils the machinery.” Knowledgeable estimates hold that anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the U.S. aid received by South Vietnam was routinely raked off the top by knaves in its government and military. One popular
South Vietnamese racket wound up stuffing the pockets of ARVN officers with $100 million a year. The racket in question? Washing GI clothes.

  Yet Martin had opposed the Vietnam War, saying, “We should have never gone in there with American soldiers.” Years after the fall of Saigon, Martin told Larry Engelmann that he “never really had any great attachment to the Vietnamese, North or South. I don't particularly like any of them. I love the Thai. I think they're the most marvelous people in the world.” Martin's fondness for the Thai could no doubt be traced to his success as ambassador there: “We had the same sort of insurgency in the Northeast [of Thailand] that they had in the beginning in [Vietnam], and I kept insisting that I didn't see any white faces on the other side…. [N]o Americans in combat or any combat advisors, even…. I wouldn't let the Americans even carry sidearms on the bases out there.” The insurgency in Thailand was ultimately defeated by the Thai people themselves—and, Martin added, “We didn't have any My Lai massacres either.” As for Vietnam, a nation torn to pieces by a war he did not support, Martin had only one goal. As he told Henry Kissinger in February 1975, “There is absolutely no way that I am not going to be held responsible for the fall of Saigon. From beginning to end, it's going to be me. So I am not interested in doing anything except what makes sense right now to get the Americans out alive and as many of our Vietnamese friends, to whom we have committed ourselves, as we can.”

  But Martin's notion of what the U.S. commitment to Vietnam amounted to had its limits, as Ed Daly learned when he barged into Martin's office on March 28,1975, the day of Danang's disastrous barge evacuation. Daly was the president and founder of World Airways, a charter airline, often in government employ, that had profited during the war by running rice and weapons to South Vietnam, as well as delivering copies of Stars and Stripes, which was printed in Japan, to Saigon. A former Golden Gloves boxer, the paunchy, bearlike Daly had a fondness for drama and bluster, as evidenced by his tendency to stroll around Saigon in flowered Hawaiian shirts and a shoulder holster crammed with a loaded .38. He was wearing the holster when he walked into Martin's embassy office, along with a many-galloned cowboy hat. A nervous Marine guard trailed after Daly. “Give the gun to the Marine if you want to talk to me,” Martin insisted. “I can get in to see popes,” Daly complained, “heads of state, generals, with one or two days’ notice. Why do you make me wait ten days to see you?” That he was commonly armed and routinely foulmouthed did not apparently occur to Daly as possible explanations for why Martin resisted meeting with him, nor the fact that Martin had been out of the country for several weeks.