by Tom Bissell
Kissinger had been in a “position to shape” so many nations’ histories, not only that of Vietnam but those of Cambodia, Chile, East Timor, Cyprus. It is a parade of such consistent misery that it is hard to believe that the baton leader could possibly allow himself a backward glance, much less a “pain” he would care to “still.” The men whose professional acquaintance Kissinger had made during the Vietnam War—Nixon, Thieu, Ford—fared well only by comparison. In fact, only one species of humanity seemed to emerge with consistently full sails after dealings with Henry Kissinger: Asian Communists.
IX
Standing beside lohno's bed, you reach through a pure stillness so dense and soundless it seems to you almost mystical. Your cupped palm comes to rest upon your son's tiny forehead, his skin blood warm, vaguely humid. You marvel at how this hard shield of young bone only millimeters beneath lohno's flesh gives way to an impossibly soft edging of fine black hair. You rub a bit of his hair between your fingers. The inexplicable reality of lohno stuns you. This small, sleeping mass of tissue, growing as you gaze upon him, is your five-year-old son. You know how terribly fragile tissue is, how prone it is to tear and bleed, how inadequately scaffolds of bone protect their sinewy cargo of heart and lung and liver. You touch this intact and whole little body, knowing only that he is yours. Your son.
Sometimes you want to crush your boys, to hold them so close that everything damaged inside you is pressurized into nothing but love. Your love is an inferno that, miraculously, destroys nothing. You are in awe of this ferocious yet harmless love, and you pledge, as you needlessly fuss with lohno's blanket, that your boys will never doubt your affection, ever, under any circumstances. Your own father firmly withheld his affection, and did so without apology. Manhood, for him, began at twelve, and a few years after you had passed this magically transformative age he proved it to you by dying. You have never been able to quite believe the men and women around Escanaba who approach you with stories of your father's munificence. The doorman at the House of Ludington describing the Christmas Eve your father handed him the gift of a transistor radio. The woman whose rent your father covered during a hard time. The waiters who fondly recall his extravagant tips. These people are only a little younger than you and, unaware that you have few similar memories of your father, always seem to expect something more than your pained smile and clumsy retreat. But he was a good man. So good. This you recognized, then and now. You wish merely that he had not been so indirect in his goodness. Even in death he is stingy, for what are your memories of him now but deficits he still refuses to cover?
You stagger down the hallway while walls and doorjambs leap out at you and picture frames jump from their nails. You stop to rub your battered shoulder as the floor beneath you pitches and sinks. What is wrong with this house? Why is it attacking you? Your little sister Alicia's door: locked. You worry about her—such a stubborn girl!—and remember the night she looked icily at Muff, who was basting a roast. “My mother,” Alicia announced, “didn't do it that way.” Muff's head fell and quietly hung there for several moments. “I'm not your mother, Alicia,” Muff finally said, looking over at her. “I'm never going to be your mother. And I'm sorry, but I can't do a thing about it.” Stubborn, stubborn girl, arguing with an equally stubborn girl about a surpassingly stubborn woman, lesus! You move down the upstairs hallway—a long dark space that deserves to be haunted—doorways passing you on the right, a solid bank of windows on the left. Your brother Paul's door is open. And there he is. He must have come in through the back and taken the narrow, rarely used staircase off the kitchen. His room smells like a brewery filled with sweaty socks next to a barnyard. Paul lies faceup on his bed, his open mouth emitting one chainsawlike snore after another, his arms flung out from his body and one foot still in its shoe. You stare at him, thinking, All these people in my care. All these eyes that keep me informed of how often I disappoint them.
They would not care to know the many beachheads of your concern. This house contains a multiplicity of futures for you to worry over. You can feel the future sometimes, moving through the passageways of the house, each version of it as distinct as an odor, each impossible to assign to its bearer. Like poltergeists of possibility, they drift by you, spin you around, and turn to mist as they pass through your spatulate fingers. And now another future seems to stir in the darker, more sinister quiet at the end of the hallway. You look through the floating shadows at this unknowable future—or is this something from the past? You are still outside Paul's bedroom and feel a sudden need to be elsewhere. You are only thirty-three, and already you have ghosts coming at you from every temporal direction. You go down the stairs (since when did they get so fucking steep?), stumbling once, near the bottom, turning your ankle and feeling it merely as the idea of pain—just as a ghost is merely the idea of a person, just as the future is merely an idea of the present.
Muff, promisingly, has left your bedroom door open, but you hesitate before going in. You know you are not ready for sleep. You are, in fact, horribly awake, your eyes so wide and raw they feel held open by toothpicks. You stand a single step outside your bedroom's threshold, staring into the thick breathing blackness at the just-visible foot of your bed, its comforter aglow in moonlight. You are awake, but is she awake? Is she waiting for you to slip beside her? Two rooms away the television still murmurs, splashing the room between you and it with inviting color. The momentum of looking over at the adjacent room sloshes your body's weight to the right. You list, slowly begin to fall, regain some modicum of balance with two thunderous steps, and fall into a nearby chair so elderly its springs audibly break beneath your weight. Much better. You have begun to come to grips with the fact that your inability to stand up straight is not so much a matter of the house attacking you but more that you are afloat on a wave of alcohol.
Still: how nice it is to be drunk. Much better than getting drunk, which took so much alienating effort. But being drunk required no effort, and by the time you were drunk everyone was gone. But now, for some reason, you are tired. You sit there, enjoying this room in which no one ever sits. The room feels different from other rooms. The absences are lighter, a pleasantly unexciting novelty not unlike sitting in a car no one has yet owned. Nothing obligates you here, and the feeling is shiveringly unfamiliar. You feel cold. So many rooms in this house, and within them so many different kinds of warmth. Moments ago you wanted only to hold your boys. But your wife, the woman you love more than anything, you want only to avoid. Once you have convinced yourself that this, too, is a form of love, you stand. Your hand closes around your bedroom door's glass knob and pulls it shut. The door catches with a snap. You know if she is awake she has heard this. You are making as much noise as a convoy. She has heard the whole thing.
In the kitchen, you prepare to wash up the dishes left over from lunch. You remove your tie. You scrape various tidbits off the plates into a mangy brown paper bag, to be given eventually to Guenella. You prepare a bubble bath in the sink for the plates and silverware, and with infinite care you lower an aquamarine bowl into the tepid foam. Its resonant flint glass emits a sound full of muffled mellowness as it settles down to soak. You work very slowly, with a certain vagueness of manner that might be taken for a mist of abstraction in a less methodical man. You grope under the bubbles, around the glasses, and under the melodious bowl, for any piece of forgotten silverware—and you retrieve a nutcracker. You rinse it, and are wiping it, when the leggy thing somehow slips out of the towel and falls like a man from a roof. You almost catch it—your fingertips actually come into contact with it in midair, but this only helps to propel it into the treasure-concealing foam of the sink, where an excruciating crack of broken glass follows upon the plunge. You hurl the towel into a corner and, turning away, stand for a moment staring at the blackness beyond the threshold of the open back door. You look very old, suddenly, weathered by emotion, until a film of tears dims your blank, unblinking eyes. Then, with a moan of anguished anticipation, you go back to
the sink and, bracing yourself, dip your hand deep into the foam. A jagger of glass stings you. Gently you remove a broken glass. The beautiful bowl is intact—but of course, this is not my father. It is Nabokov's Timofey Pnin. This late scene from Pnin stands as perhaps the saddest few pages I have ever read. They have nothing to do with my father, of course. But neither does much of what I have written here. I am done trying to imagine how my parents experienced April 29, 1975. I scavenge Nabokov as I have scavenged all of my information about that night.
For the weeks and months I have been writing of this evening, for instance, I have been looking at a photograph of my mother. It is an old photo, white-bordered, its once-vivid colors now dim and tannic. She is sitting at the kitchen table of the Bissell house, a house I have no memories of her ever living in, a house in which I last slept when I was twelve. She is staring past my highchair-trapped brother, whose impish face is turned toward the camera. In the photo she wears too much eye shadow and a blue turtleneck, the costume in which my imagination has dressed her here. This photo is not from 1975. In fact, I have no idea when it was taken. (Neither does she.) The half-full can of Budweiser that my father discovers when he arrives home has its origin in this photo, as do the lip-sticked cigarette butts, as does the centerpiece loaded with knickknacks. I have ransacked this photo because it is virtually the only visual reference point I have for this time I could not experience and these events I did not witness. The Bissells were never a photographical family. Whatever photos were taken have been scattered by the various winds of divorce. About that I never much cared—until now.
While there is much I cannot know, I have come upon an equal amount I am unable to establish. My father says he came up with the name “lohno,” yet my mother makes an identical claim. My Uncle Paul tells me he was married in 1974 and by 1975 was no longer living with my parents, yet both my mother and father initially remembered him being there in 1975. And although my mother says she has “no vivid memories of Saigon falling,” she does “remember the day Elvis died.” (I am sure, too, that I was demandingly underfoot for much of April 29, 1975, but the inanity of writing about myself as a sixteen-month-old baby made itself clear after one quickly abandoned sentence.)
The relentlessness of all this uncertainty is not local only to the story of my family. A party was held at the residence of the Polish ambassador to Vietnam, for instance, the day President Thieu resigned. Some present at the party claim it took place in the afternoon, others at night. When Thieu slipped out of the country later that day, some put forth the notion that he was carrying a suitcase filled with gold (“The clink of metal on metal broke through the stillness like muffled wind chimes”), while others argue he was not (“That story is just bullshit”). A dissertation's worth of discrepancies exist between what Kissinger remembers and what Polgar remembers, between what Nguyen Cao Ky remembers and what Ambassador Martin remembers, between what Wolfgang Lehmann remembers and what Frank Snepp remembers. “I was appalled at what he told me,” Snepp writes of Lehmann. “His version of the truth, as he spun it out… bore little relation to what I remembered.”
Among other things, history is the arrangement of memory. History is an argument with the past. The United States could have won the war in Vietnam if its soldiers had not been forced to adhere to disastrously protracted battle plans when it was clear by 1967 that simply killing huge numbers of the enemy was not a realistic path toward victory. The war in Vietnam was unwinnable due to the historically empirical difficulty of stifling insurgencies toward which a sizable portion of the indigenous population feels sympathy. The war was won in Vietnam by 1971 and lost in Washington. By 1971 it was clear to those fighting in Vietnam that the losing U.S. effort had passed beyond all moral solvency. Or: My parents’ marriage fell apart because of the emotional collapse my father suffered after the fall of Saigon in 1975. The marriage was over by 1972. “The reason we got divorced is because we got divorced. And frankly, it's none of your damned business.” “Your dad could be the kindest, gentlest, most wonderful man.” “I put a tremendous yoke upon her with Paul and Alicia, you know.” “Things were bad for the last three or four years.” “I think she wanted the marriage to be over, so she found someone else.” “He did the best he could do. We all did. But I fell out of love with him.”
Nothing is so impossible to imagine as disaster—until it is upon you. My father wrote my mother that he wanted to be with her for two thousand years. At the moment he wrote those words, any other fate must have seemed inconceivable. Henry Kissinger wrote that “the total Communist takeover” of Vietnam was a disaster that “four American administrations had resisted so strenuously for two decades.” Indeed, defeat in Vietnam, the columnist Joseph Alsop wrote in 1964, would signify the surrender of “all that we fought for in the Second World War and in the Korean War.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk wrote to President Johnson in 1965 that he was “convinced it would be disastrous for the United States and the Free World to permit Southeast Asia to be overrun by the Communist North.” The unthinkably disastrous occurred nonetheless, and I—we all—live in the paradoxical normalcy of aftermath. Of course, I do not intend to equate the destruction of my parents’ marriage with the collapse of South Vietnam, yet in my mind they are endlessly connected, just as the largest house can be entered through its smallest door.
Why do disasters demand such constant revisitation? Perhaps the first human being to delineate yesterday from today was not acting upon any natural observation but was instead seeking to commemorate some previously unthinkable event. Where were you when? Do you remember? We employ so many signifiers to hallow our larger, shared disasters that memory itself collapses beneath the weight. I was there. I remember. But all one truly remembers of most disasters is having forgotten what existence was like before they occurred. Disaster does not change one's world so much as narrow its parameters. Futures once as boundless as pastures shrivel into tunnels. What is lost in a disaster is never innocence. What is lost is a different sort of knowledge.
On April 29,1975, my father was losing something of himself. He was losing what was at that time possibly the largest part of himself. This was his certainty that what he had suffered in Vietnam was necessary. In other words, he was losing his past and future all at once. He would lose much more. We all would. We would lose so much we would forget, perhaps, what it was we had lost.
X
With night falling over Saigon, sedans belonging to the U.S. government, their headlights shining, were arranged in a circle around the embassy's courtyard. Thomas Polgar, who by this time had likely begun to realize the Brobdingnagian nature of his analytical blunders, went to the wall to look for his beloved Vietnamese chauffeur, Ut, who had gone out earlier in the day to look for people Polgar himself had inadvertently stranded and now was unable to get back into the embassy. Polgar— who may have been drunk at this point—proved powerless to get Ut pulled up. “I think I saw him in the crowd,” Snepp reports Polgar as murmuring, “but I could not reach him. I simply could not.” Polgar now sank into what he himself called an “emotional coma.” It is little wonder. The betrayals of so many Vietnamese—a series of careless American shrugs that tore lives in two—were growing apparent to all by the minute.
Hundreds of translators working for the CIA—men and women who were, in Snepp's words, “the best acquainted with CIA operations and personnel”—were left behind because the officer in charge of their evacuation took an early chopper out. Snepp also writes of the loyal U.S. Embassy guards of Nung descent—the Nung are one of Vietnam's eternally oppressed aboriginal people—with whom he exchanged words on April 29: “Remember us,” one Nung guard said to Snepp. It was “one of his few English phrases. That was the last I saw of him. He and all the rest would be left behind.” The embassy's switchboard could scarcely handle the number of calls coming in. Lacy Wright, a State Department officer, picked up one call. “We've been up here all day and nobody has come to get us,” the caller said, through heavy sobs
. Wright swallowed hard, offered some useless advice, and hung up. More calls. One hundred and fifty people were trapped here. Two hundred more were trapped there. “We were told to come here. What do we do?” “I'm a Vietnamese, but I got my American citizenship in 1973. I've got three kids. What can I do?” Eventually, the embassy phone was simply not answered. Meanwhile, according to Snepp, Graham Martin overheard this exchange over the walkie-talkie in his office: “Hey, there's another gook climbing over the wall. Shoot him!” “I can't shoot him. For chris-sakes, let him over.”
Later in the evening, President Ford's chief of staff, a man named Donald Rumsfeld, cabled Martin about a pressing matter: “I understand that 154 IBM employees, including their families, are still awaiting removal from Saigon. I further understand they are now standing in front of the IBM building awaiting instructions where they should go for evacuation. I ask you to do your utmost to see that they are evacuated with the current helicopter lift.” One's heart goes out to these stranded souls. But it is a scenario of depressing familiarity that, among a metropolis of identical desperation, the only people our future secretary of defense felt any urge to look after were employed by a major U.S. corporation. Despite Rumsfeld's efforts, the IBM employees never made it out. Nor did the employees of Esso and Shell, whom Martin had earlier counseled to stay for the good of the country. None of the Vietnamese working for Western corporations received payment for their last few weeks of work. It has been estimated that the unpaid back salaries owed to Vietnamese by Western companies amounted to almost $1 million.