by Tom Bissell
So much would happen, not only in the coming moments but also in the coming weeks, months, and years. Neil Davis would not get the shot he wanted, for the gates were opened before Tank 844 reached them. The indelible image of 844 triumphantly crashing through the gates was a minutes-later reenactment—so attuned were the victors, even at the instant of their victory, to the power of propaganda. Colonel Tin would find President Minh in his office. Minh would say, “I have been waiting since early this morning to transfer power to you,” to which Tin would answer, “There is no question of your transferring power. Your power has crumbled. You have nothing in your hands to surrender and so you cannot surrender what you do not possess.” The red, blue, and yellow National Liberation Front flag would in twenty minutes be flying from the Presidential Palace's flagpole. Saigon would be renamed Ho Chi Minh City, despite the fact that apparently its eponym's most vivid memory of his brief time spent there was his discovery of ice cream. President Minh would be arrested, consigned to a reeducation camp for a short time, and then, in 1983, be allowed to leave the Socialist Republic of Vietnam for France, where he would never speak of the war. General Le Minh Dao, who at Xuan Loc had vowed to be the shore against which PAVN's human waves would break, would perish in a reeducation camp in 1984. Nguyen Dinh Tu, the author of the “Fare Thee Well” dispatch, had numerous connections that would have allowed him to leave Saigon in the war's closing days, but he stayed to cover the Communists’ arrival, belatedly realizing that there was no one left to publish his dispatch, and would die in a Saigon prison in late 1975. Air Marshal Ky would open a liquor store in California that would go bankrupt. Ambassador Martin would suffer rumors among Washington's chattering classes that he had gone insane, retire from active State Department duty in 1977, and not get as much as a good-bye luncheon thrown for him. Communist Vietnam would invade Communist Cambodia, Communist China would invade Communist Vietnam, and there would remain Americans compelled by the logic of the Domino Theory. One million Vietnamese would abandon their country during Vietnam's first decade of reunification, despite the fact that the two Vietnams had suffered no significant exodus (other than the Catholics’ mass departure from North to South Vietnam in 1956) in three previous decades of more or less continuous war.
In 1975, you did not live in the world as it is today. There was no cable news, no live feed or satellite phone that would have allowed you to experience Saigon's final, inarguable fall while you sat in your Escanaba, Michigan, living room. There were only reports. Uncertain news from Indochina. Sketchy details emerging from Saigon. The most recent update. The last anyone had heard. Was living any easier when disaster was routinely secondhand? Were we all more able to relax? Or did you know, somehow, what was happening? Had you felt it? Are you feeling it now, as you rise from your couch, leave your unlit home without telling Muff, and wander out into the chilly spring night? What are you thinking as you start your car? How do you feel as the cold, ninety-proof vapors of your breath vanish in the car's gradually warming interior? Does the road look any different to you now as your headlights spill whitely over it? When you pass out of Escanaba and into the timbered silence of its surrounding woodlands, do you think at all of what will happen to you, your family, your children? You ride your chariot through two tall closing walls of darkness. At 11:10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, when the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon are finally bashed from their stone pillars, do you flinch? And if so, is there any place for this sharp pain to go? The trees keep coming, the darkness beyond them never ending. Does the darkness have any bottom? Will it swallow you whole or crash down upon you? You are not sure. All you know is that now the darkness stands before you. You cannot go back. Your only choice is to drive right into it.
TWO
An Illness Caused by Youth
OR
A Few Queries About the Vietnam War
My father, it was your sad image,
so often come, that urged me to these thresholds.
My ships are moored on the Tyrrhenian.
O father, let me hold your right hand fast,
do not withdraw from my embrace.
—VIRGIL, THE AENEID
I
While sitting next to my father on the All Nippon Airways flight from Tokyo to Ho Chi Minh City, I finally grasped what had been bothering me. It was not the odorlessness of the processed cabin air, or the tidally sustained roar of the engines, or even the handful of tranquilizers I had gobbled. What bothered me was the increasingly unsettling sensation of simply being beside my father. Somehow he made me feel physically diminished. Perhaps fathers could not help but make their sons feel smaller. What was a father if not the one man who would always wield power over his son? One did not have to love (or even like) one's father to sense this essential inequality. I loved my father very much, but I was suddenly a little too reminded of him, which is to say, a little afraid.
I studied the hairy hands that held open the Vietnam guidebook I had bought for him: thick fingers, big knuckles, huge glossy nails. I then regarded my father's head. It seemed something out of a circus tent. I could not even look at it all at once. His round, wet eyes, Kilimanjaran nose, lost-cavern nostrils, and geological chin dimple belonged to separate facial ecosystems. The westernmost edge of the United States’ mainland was eleven hours behind us, and his striking physiognomy occurred to me now because during the previous legs of our trip I had been seated one row ahead of my father, not next to him. I had also tired of the book I had brought aboard and was actively searching for something to think about, since, while flying, if I was not vigilant, my thoughts tended toward the macabre, such as, for example, the imminence of my own death.
Maybe all I really felt was simple filial humility. I recalled the famous schoolyard question: Can God create a boulder so large that even he cannot move it? Similarly, could a child ever feel bigger than his parents? I was not thinking of size. Rather, could a child feel existentially bigger? I did not believe so. I doubted it. And with that the various sleep aids I had ingested began, once again, to bring on the ugly process of manufactured sleep: eyelids as heavy as anchors, mind blown out like a candle, head in free-fall…. My nose smooshed hard against my father's shoulder. I sparked upright.
My father adjusted himself in his seat, still reading. Then, in an instructive singsong voice: “If you sleep now you're going to spend the first few days completely jet-lagged.”
Moments before our first flight this morning, I had taken an Ativan, an antianxiety medication. I took another Ativan right after we lifted off. A few hours later I took another. In Tokyo's airport I washed down another with a Diet Coke. I had taken a Sominex about an hour ago. I had also drunk a Sapporo. None of this was so I could sleep. The odds of my falling asleep on an airplane were cosmologically long. The reason I had taken the pills was to relax.
I was now touching my head with fascination. “I think my hair has lost its curl.”
My father looked over at me and asked, almost fondly, “How can anyone who travels as much as you be so afraid of flying? It's ridiculous.”
“Of course it's ridiculous. AH pathological fear is ridiculous. It's not as though I'm afraid of much. Flying, sharks, snakes. The classics.”
My father shook his head, the overhead light igniting around his head a dandruffy nebula. Thankfully, he changed the subject. “Do you know that today is the Marine Corps's two-hundred-and-twenty-eighth anniversary?”
“No kidding?”
A single nod. “November tenth.”
“Are you thinking this is a good omen or a bad omen?”
“I'm not thinking anything. I just thought it was a neat coincidence.”
He returned to his reading. I stared out my window at a moon so close and bright I could count the dark wrinkles around its craters. Flying to Vietnam on the 228th anniversary of the United States Marine Corps: “a neat coincidence,” indeed. While growing up, I had associated nearly everything about my father with the Marine Corps and Vietnam.<
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There were two types of Vietnam veteran: those who talked about the war and those who did not talk about it. My father talked about the war, though, if anything, this only deepened the abyss between us. I had learned something from discussions with those who had veteran fathers. This was that our fathers seemed remote because the war itself was impossibly remote. Chances were, the war had happened pre-you, before you had come to grasp the sheer accident of your own placement in time, before you recognized that the reality of yourself—your bedroom, your dolls and comic books—had nothing to do with the reality of your father. This strange, lost war, simultaneously real and unimaginable, forced us to confront the past before we had any idea of what the past really was. The war made us think theoretically long before we had the vocabulary to do so. Despite its remoteness, the war's aftereffects were inescapably intimate. At every meal Vietnam sat down, invisibly, with our families.
Inspired, I pulled out my handheld tape recorder. “Hold on. I'd like to get some stuff down.” I pushed the plastic brick toward my father's mouth.
His dubious eyes took their time traveling from me to the tape recorder before they returned to his guidebook. “All right.”
“I don't think we've ever really talked about why you joined the Marines. Why did you join the Marines?”
He did not look up and spoke very softly. “I'd always wanted to be a Marine, so I enlisted after I graduated from college. It was that simple. I couldn't get any other job.”
“But you went to Georgetown. You couldn't get a job after Georgetown?”
“Do you plan on letting me read?”
“You can read in a minute. Let's get this down.”
“What was your question?”
“Georgetown. You couldn't get a job.”
He sighed and looked straight ahead. “Well, there was a huge recession then. I suppose I could have worked in a department store or something. But I liked the Marines, I enlisted, and once they found out I could spell ‘college’ they sent me to Officer Candidates School.”
“You did this knowing Vietnam was coming.”
“We all knew it was coming. Keep in mind we did not train for Europe or the desert or mountain warfare. We did not go to northern California. We went to the swamps of Virginia. We knew exactly where we were going. Our drill instructors told us. Our officers told us. ‘We are headed for Vietnam. You and me, brother.’“
“Did it ever bother you that Johno and I didn't join the Marines?”
His face scrunched thoughtfully. “I don't know if I would say it bothered me…. It could have been something for me to feel some pride in, yeah. I don't know.” Back to reading.
“Let me ask you about these Marine Corps commercials they have nowadays.”
He looked tired. “Which commercials?”
“The one with the knight defeating an evil sorcerer, getting hit by lightning, and turning into a Marine. Or the one with the guy fighting a magma monster in a volcano, getting hit by lightning, and turning into a Marine.”
His hand moved in an oblique, conjuring manner. “I've seen them.”
“But have you ever seen Soviet propaganda? One major difference is that Soviet propaganda had some connection, however deranged, to reality. Is being a Marine at all like fighting sorcerers?” No response. “Doesn't seeing those commercials bother you, as a Marine?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Come on. You don't find it a little bit weird?”
“It's an honorable career.”
“That's not what we're talking about.”
He held out a flattened hand, palm up. “What is a Marine's job? A Marine is a professional soldier, trained to kill. He's not trained to do anything else except kill, sustain himself in a horrible situation, do whatever good he can, and accomplish what he's told to do by his superiors. Or her superiors. Like it or not, that's a Marine's job. It's not always right, or correct, but that's what Marines are sworn to do.”
At this he retreated back into his guidebook. I decided I would leave him alone, switched off the recorder, and watched our bunned and kerchiefed Japanese stewardesses wander up and down the 777's plastic corridors. Finally I was left staring into the blank shallows of the television screen mounted in the seat before me.
As a boy, I dreaded those evenings my father had had too much to drink, stole into my bedroom, woke me up, and for an hour at a time would try to explain to me, his ten-year-old son, why the decisions he had made— decisions, he would mercilessly remind himself, that had gotten his best friends killed—were the only decisions he could have made. Other nights, he would remember fondly the various women he had courted in Vietnam, of which there seemed an extraordinary number, giving over my still-unformed imagination to bizarre thoughts of myself as an Asian boy. With my school friends I would tell elaborate stories about my father. How he had single-handedly fought off an entire company of “gooners.” The day he had gotten lost rafting down a river and survived a waterfall plunge. The time he had been multiply shot and how a kind black soldier had dragged him to safety. Some were true; most were not. The war had not ended for him, and soon it was alive in me.
Sometimes it felt as though Vietnam was all my father and I had ever talked about; sometimes it felt as though we had never really talked about it. Oddly, the Vietnam War had given me much for which to be thankful, such as the fact that my father's friend and fellow Vietnam veteran Philip Caputo ultimately became my literary mentor. My father makes a brief appearance in Caputo's A Rumor of War, which is commonly regarded as one of the finest memoirs of the conflict and was the first Vietnam book to become a major bestseller. When in A Rumor of War Caputo learns of the death of his and my father's friend Walter Levy, who survived all of two weeks in Vietnam, he remembers a night in Georgetown when he, Levy, and some others went to a bar “to drink and look at girls and pretend we were still civilians.” And then this: “We sat down and filled the glasses, all of us laughing, probably at something Jack Bissell said. Was Bissell there that night? He must have been, because we were all laughing very hard and Bissell was always funny.” I still remember the first time I read that sentence—I was twelve, thirteen—and how my heart had convulsed. Here was the man of whom I had never had as much as a glimpse. Here was the man whose life had not yet been hewn by so much death, whom I did not find in bluish, 2 a.m. darkness drinking wine and watching Gettysburg or Platoon for the fortieth time. In A Rumor of War I saw the still-normal man my father could have become, a man with the average sadnesses.
I used to stare at his framed purple heart (“the dumb medal,” he always called it) and, next to it, a photo of him taken during his training at Quantico: BISSELL stenciled across his left breast, friendly Virginia greenery hovering behind him, my smirking father looking a little like a young Harrison Ford, holding his rifle, his eyes unaccountably soft. How I had wanted to find that man. A dinner with a magazine editor, during which we were supposed to come up with ideas I might write about, led me to talking about my father and, inevitably, about Vietnam. The magazine editor, having regarded my earlier ideas as “terrible,” looked at me, leaned back, and said, “That's what you should write about.” I was almost thirty years old, my father just past sixty. It staggered me, suddenly, how little relative time we still had left together. I knew that if I wanted to find the unknown part of my father I would have to do it soon, in Vietnam, where he had been made and unmade, killed and resurrected. Months ago I told my father over the phone that a magazine was willing to send us to Vietnam. He was quiet, as quiet as I had ever heard him. “Gosh,” he said.
Now, on the plane, the Japanese captain made the announcement that we were “making our final approach” into Ho Chi Minh City, his English pronunciation that of a man whose tongue had been injected with codeine.
My father's head tilted at a doglike angle.
“What did he say?”
“I think he said we were ‘baking our final perch.’
“I thought he said we were ‘making
our finer porch.’”
We laughed, and then my father's large hand clamped down on my knee. He squeezed too hard and for too long. “You okay?” I asked him.
He nodded, then smiled. “Nervous.”
“Well. I'm nervous, too, if it makes you feel better.”
He thought about this far longer than I had intended, which was not at all. “That does not make me feel better.”