by Tom Bissell
“So 2005 minus two is today.”
My father was silent. Then all at once his color went. “Oh my God. Holy shit.”
“Kinda incredible, isn't it?”
“I didn't know I was that old until just now.”
He was touching his face as I lined him up in the viewfinder. “So if someone had told you thirty-eight years ago that you'd be having your photograph taken atop the Hai Van Pass, what would you have said?”
His hand dropped militarily to his side. “I would have expected to be here.”
“You would have expected to be here? Say ‘cheese,’ by the way.”
“As a conquering general. Cheese.”
I walked up a small hill to an old stone gate, built by the French, that resembled a brick farmhouse. Beneath this gate's low stone arch, which was wide enough to allow the passage of only one vehicle at a time, all traffic had been monitored and checked. A grassed-over little road—the remains of the old Highway 1, which, then and now, reached from one tip of Vietnam to the other—was all that was left of this old colonial hourglass, while below and around the hill swept the wide blacktop carpet of the new Highway 1, which was being rebuilt and upgraded throughout the country thanks to a massive World Bank loan. The First Indochina War's greatest chronicler, Bernard Fall, had nicknamed Highway 1 the “Street without Joy,” usage of which had carried over into my father's war.
Fall was one of the war's most fascinating noncombatants. Born in Austria, educated in the United States, active in the French Underground during World War II, an investigator during the Nuremberg Trials, and eventually seen as the foremost Western analyst of Southeast Asia, Fall was a thermometer of American fortunes during the war's earlier years. In 1965, Fall had some confidence that the United States would prevail, stressing the “determinative weight” of American intervention. But he also foresaw the dangers. “The Vietnamese,” he wrote in 1965, “fall into two categories; the Viet Cong (also known as VC, Victor Charlie, Charlie, or ‘the Congs’), and Our’Vietnamese, for whom there are no particular nicknames, except perhaps Our allies’ or ‘the friend-lies’; both terms followed by a guffaw.” But however strong a case the United States made for itself militarily in Vietnam, “a prostrate South Vietnam, plowed under by bombers and artillery and still in the hands of a politically irrelevant regime, may become the victim of aroused social and political forces for which no aircraft carrier and eight-jet bomber can provide a ready answer in the long run.” Later he argued, “There must be negotiation and settlement sooner or later, unless the Johnson administration wishes to leave the Vietnamese War in what has been called the shadowland between unattainable victory and unacceptable surrender.”
Fall understood North Vietnam—he conducted fascinating early interviews with Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong—and knew there were monsters in the Politburo as well as men of relative honor. He also believed that the American, and French, way of life was probably preferable to that which the Communists wished to inflict on the South: “[W]hat America is seeking is not total victory over the Viet Cong. We are going for total defeat of the VC. The semantics are important, because what America should want to prove in Viet-Nam is that the Free World is ‘better,’ not that it can kill people more efficiently. If we could induce 100,000 Viet Cong to surrender to our side because our offers of social reform are better than those of the other side's, that would be victory.” He would come to hold these articles of faith less strongly and ultimately came to regard the war as “a local conflict with outside support which has gotten out of hand.” One must content oneself with wondering what Fall would have believed later. On February 21, 1967, during an operation in which he had been horrified to see the Marines he was traveling with open fire on some innocent peasant's water buffalo, Fall stepped on a land mine on the Street without Joy and finally traveled to his own shadowland.
On the other side of the Hai Van Pass, Vietnam grew more tropical, a great rotting chromatic extravagance of jungle and rice paddies. “This is my Vietnam,” my father said with satisfied recognition. The jungle. When hit by the sun it looked golden and hot and desiccated, but when darkened by shade it looked green and cool and secret. The rice paddies seemed as massive as ten plantations after a deluge. One hectare of growing rice needed ten thousand tons of water. A thick mist hovered above these calm, endless reaches of standing water, the shoots of rice straw seven feet tall. Water buffaloes the size of small dinosaurs were sunk to their flanks in the mud, while rice farmers wearing condomlike body bags waded through chest-deep water holding bundled nets above their heads. The majority of the houses around these rice fields were tin-roofed concrete-block houses, the porches of which were stilted up by rough, unfinished lumber. Muddy, partially flooded yards were strewn with mangled tires, wooden Coca-Cola crates, and old gasoline cans. Perched dryly atop occasional mounds of gravel were wheelbarrows and bicycles. The inhabitants of all these homes were rice farmers. Thomas Jefferson planted Vietnamese rice at Monti cello, I recalled reading. Just as suddenly I thought of Ho Chi Minh. “Rice fields,” Ho once said, “are battlefields.”
“Independence,” my father muttered, as though reading my mind. The edges of his mouth pulled down, and his unsentimental face had gone slack. But our car was fast, and soon the rice paddies were behind us.
On the approach to Danang houses were bundled together along the road even more tightly than usual. In many cases one could take three steps from the highway's edge and be standing in the middle of some Vietnamese family's living room. Then we stopped at a shop: Truong needed cigarettes. I got out of the car and followed him inside, finding for sale on a discreetly low shelf various Vietnamese nostrums: deer-horn wine, stomach of porcupine wine, bird wine. Floating within each bottle was as advertised. Also available was something called Cobratox, or “ointment with snake venom.” Asian herbalism had a dark side one rarely heard about from its grinning, vitamin-packed Western champions.
As we got closer to Danang, the architecture began to change. Now beside the low gray houses common to rural Vietnam were unusually tall and strikingly slender homes painted hot pink, mint green, lilac, and lavender. Some have called this style Lego Deco. The buildings looked like the kind of home one might find in seaside Miami if seaside Miami were filled with Vietnamese who had won the lottery and discovered the aesthetics of a certain kind of homosexuality. When I asked about the color of these homes, Hien explained that the Vietnamese “enjoy colorful things.” One of the sadder things about developing economies is the grim middle period during which people figure out that just because something can be bought does not necessarily mean it should be.
We passed a disused airport runway, one of many reminders in these vicinities that Danang once headquartered the United States Marines. All around us were areas the Marines had renamed: the Arizona Territory, China Beach, Marble Mountain, Elephant Valley. Another reminder was the city's Amerasians, the epithet given to the children of Vietnamese mothers and American fathers. Danang was said to have the largest number of Amerasians in all of Vietnam. Hien pointed out an Amerasian beggar alongside the road. The man looked at least thirty-five years old and had obviously been sired by a black father. One of the most depressing aspects of this altogether depressing phenomenon was how much harder life was for Amerasians of partially black descent, probably because of the fact that many Vietnamese identify black skin with Cambodians, with whom they have a long antipathetic history. A good number of Vietnam's Amerasians had over the last fifteen years or so been allowed into the United States to seek their fortunes.
“I never much liked Danang,” my father said.
I looked over at him. “Weren't all your higher-ups here?”
“You got it.”
“Your father-in-law was here, too, though. Colonel T.”
“I didn't know him then.”
“What did you think of Colonel T.?”
“My father-in-law? Good pilot. Experienced man. Honorable man. Steeped in the Marine Corps tradi
tion. A wonderful guy. I loved him. And he and I pretty much saw eye to eye when I decided to leave the Marine Corps.”
“But I read a letter from Colonel T. saying he thought you were making a mistake.”
“At first he thought I was making a mistake, but he realized there was nobody to take care of my brother and sister. He was mad at me for about an hour. When I got out, Colonel T. and I became very close. We exchanged secrets. We knew a lot of things about each other. And I admired and respected him deeply.”
“When he died, how did you feel?”
“How do you think I felt? Horrible. He and I were partners in business, you know.”
“I didn't know that.” Why did I not know that? “What business were you partners in?”
“We bought some property in northern Michigan. I told him about it, he said, All right, here's the seed money,’ which I didn't have. But he and I were equal partners. I sold it two years after he died for about two thousand percent profit.”
“Jesus.”
“That's what I said at the time, as a matter of fact. It allowed your mom and me some momentary prosperity.”
I waited. “Do you think Vietnam is the reason you and Mom divorced?”
My father looked out the window at a long stretch of empty beach. The ocean was on our right, and on our left was quite possibly the settled world's least utilized stretch of gorgeous beachfront. Nothing here but public housing slums—dim, beaten buildings whose laundry lines were full and whose doorways and windows were dark.
“We became incompatible,” my father said finally.
I did not know what to say to that. Scars deadened the skin but were also easily torn. My father did not know why they had divorced. It seemed amazing, our inability to understand our own lives. The tires thunked along the road. Streaking beside us was part of the beachfront where both the French and United States had begun their invasions of Vietnam, 118 years apart. The weather was so rough during the U.S. invasion that the first landing had to be postponed. The waves looked truly splendid today—huge and blue and rolling beneath frothy crowns of white foam. But there was no one out here. These slum-town beaches were completely empty. It appeared that Charlie really did not surf.
My father cleared his throat. “Divorce is like a cancer that never goes away.”
I looked at him. “It's painful.”
“Not anymore.”
“To think about, I mean.”
“Those were sad days. Be glad you're too young to remember them.”
“You didn't want to go back to Escanaba after the Marines.”
“Not especially, no.”
Again, we had never talked about this. How was it possible that we had never talked about this? “Are you glad you went back to Escanaba today?”
“Yeah,” he said—though again, it took him a moment. “But I'm glad only because I don't know what would have happened otherwise. I'm quite happy with the way things turned out.” His mouth puckered. “Actually, I don't know if I'm happy or not.”
“You don't?”
A brisk shake of his head. “No, I'm happy. I've had a great life. I raised a wonderful son, and also you.”
My overall impression of Danang was that of a city being augmented, enhanced, piled on, attached to. The Vietnamese government was said to be trying to avoid what economists have called “the dumbbell effect”: the enrichment and development of Hanoi and Saigon while neglect rode herd upon Vietnam's slender middle. If the dumbbell effect was not foiled, it would not be for lack of trying: dusty air, metal scaffoldings, and shirtless construction workers were to Danang what orange-robed Buddhists and stately pagodas were to Hue.
Across many of Danang's streets stretched a high green canopy of thick tree foliage through which only pieces of sunlight were able to fall, giving many scooterists a flickering, film-stock aura as they drove along. Once our car had passed through the central part of Danang, we came upon an open riverside area where the city's famous Museum of Cham Sculpture sat across from the glass cube that was the state television station's new building. Like most of Vietnam's French-built administrative buildings, the museum was a Cheez Whiz orange-yellow and had grotty growths of moss and mold over much of its facing.
The Chams are a people of Indian descent who had the great misfortune to migrate to—and, for a while, flourish within—one of the most contested areas on earth. The Chams’ kingdom, called Champa, endured in varying sizes from the second century to the 1800s, when the Vietnamese, after working at it for six centuries, drove the last of the landholding Chams from their final hectares of ancestral territory. Yet throughout the upheaval the Chams developed an elaborate, sophisticated, and extremely violent culture: one scholar calls them “the Norsemen of the South China Sea” due to their fondness for conducting raiding parties. Inside the Cham Museum itself was a good deal of phallic and mammillate sculpture. The real Cham treasures were found outdoors, all along central Vietnam's coast. These were the ancient towers of Champa—rutilant stone temples that from a distance often looked like spaceships perched atop a hill. A curiously large number of U.S. military bunkers were built on hilltops near Cham towers, probably due to very similar security fears, and to climb a hill on which either stood was to gaze from one structure to the other and marvel at the sad iterations of history.
My father had raced up and down coastal Vietnam, which was the hub of the Champa kingdom until the fifteenth century, and though he had noticed the towers he had given them no thought. “While here I wasn't really looking for artifacts from the Cham Dynasty,” he explained as we walked through the museum. “I think we probably stood in the towers to get out of the rain a few times, but that's about it.” While most of the sites of Cham architecture are now under UNESCO protection, and although there remain about 100,000 people of Cham descent in Vietnam, the ways of the Chams were imperiled. We learned this while looking upon some defiantly basic-looking Cham pottery that was being sold in the museum. The Chams made their pottery with no kiln and no potting wheel. Today only four women on the planet were said to know this almost literally prehistoric method of potting. All were Chams and in their eighties. Meanwhile, their vases were selling here for $10 apiece.
We drove out of Danang, past Monkey Mountain, past Marble Mountain (in which NLF guerrillas often hid, spying on U.S. soldiers swimming at nearby China Beach), while my father told Hien the story of how he had saved the life of my godfather during Vietnam. This had happened at the village of Tam Ky, a few hours south of where we now were. Suddenly Hien informed us that Tam Ky was where he had grown up.
“Really?” my father asked. “Because I was in Tam Ky a hell of a lot.”
“I used to stand beside the road,” Hien said, looking back at us, “and wave and say, ‘Hello, GIs!’ And they would throw me candy and cigarettes and C-rats.”
My father stared at Hien. Something watery and bottomless in his gaze suddenly began to harden. “Hien, I used to toss C-rats to kids around here all the time.”
Hien laughed. “I know!” he told my father. “I remember you!”
This was clearly intended as a joke, but my father did not laugh. Instead he looked even more deeply into Hien's eyes and took Hien by the forearm. “Maybe it was you,” my father said. “Maybe it was.”
Hien gave my father's arm a game return shake but quickly looked away. Within him some bright nerve of memory had obviously been touched. For all that had been written about the suffering of American soldiers and their families, during and after the Vietnamese War, people such as Hien had suffered far more thoroughly. My father crossed over into the inferno. Hien had woken up one morning to find the inferno consuming his bed, his bedroom, his entire home. The Vietnamese War was not only (in the words of various historians) “the end of America's absolute confidence in its moral exclusivity” or the “berserk American dream” or “perhaps the worst miscalculation in our history” but the final and most excruciating chapter in a deeply Vietnamese story in which the Vietnamese were t
he most meaningful actors and absorbed the most lasting damage.
While my father and Hien discussed their qualitatively different memories of Tam Ky, I looked out onto the ocean. The waves tumbled up to the shore and detonated in carbonated sprays of white. I could scarcely discern the waterline from the sky. The endless hazy blue miles simply devoured one's gaze. Much of interest had occurred off these coasts, and a good deal of it had come to light only fairly recently. Somewhere out there, for instance, was Cu Lao Cham Island, otherwise known as Paradise Island. Defenseless fishermen from North Vietnam were kidnapped by Vietnamese in the employ of U.S. intelligence, blindfolded, and taken to Paradise Island, which the kidnapped fishermen were told was a part of “liberated” North Vietnam. The kidnapped fishermen were then informed of a group of North Vietnamese dissidents called the Sacred Sword of the Patriots League. (The “sacred sword” referred to the story of the fifteenth-century Vietnamese patriot Le Loi, who was awarded by a divine tortoise a sword that Le Loi used to defeat Vietnam's Chinese invaders. After his triumph he returned the sword to Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi, where the sword is said to remain today.) The kidnapped North Vietnamese fishermen were then told that Paradise Island was a secret SSPL training camp. All the personnel working and living on the island either faked a northern accent or were themselves northerners who had come South in 1956. The fishermen were finally told that the SSPL was going to liberate North Vietnam from the Chinese Communists, who controlled the men of the Politburo. The fishermen were given SSPL literature, a few gifts, and some marginal training, then released back into North Vietnam.
No one on Paradise Island actually cared whether these fishermen worked toward the goals of the SSPL or immediately reported their ordeal to the authorities. As it turned out, there was no Sacred Sword of the Patriots League. The entire story was a creation of the Pentagon's Special Operations Group (SOG). The hope was that the story would create panic among the leaders of North Vietnam. Needless to say, as Richard H. Shultz, Ir., relates in The Secret War Against Hanoi, North Vietnam's intelligence apparatus saw through the charade more or less instantly.