by Tom Bissell
“In the Second World War,” my father went on, “when our fathers and grandfathers went off to war, they had six hundred percent replacement. That means one hundred men went into battle and if any one of them died they were replaced six times. But they always had the same unit, same flag unit, same name, same everything. Each man was replaced six times until the war stopped. Those that survived gutted out their time. It was horrible—it was horrific—but the unit remained intact. Well, our uppers decided, ‘America can't stand that. So what we'll do is snap off a platoon here, a squad here, a company here, a battalion here, and we'll integrate them all with other units.’ What that did was break down the entire communication structure, the average soldier's basic understanding of his duty. You couldn't really train anyone, or talk to anyone, because it was all in and out. No one had any method that everyone else could learn from. So we're not able to communicate, we have no real trust in one another, I don't know how you operate tactically, you don't know how I do things. We had so little connection. We didn't come here alongside the men we'd trained with, and we went home alone. And new guys always arrived alone.”
“I read about that somewhere. No one would want to go out on patrol with a new guy because new guys smelled too clean. A lot of soldiers were convinced the Revolutionary Force could smell the soap on their skin.”
“And we could smell the nuoc mam on theirs. Yeah, it's true. And it all hurt us, all of it—it hurt us badly.”
“Why did the Americans decide to fight like that?” This was Hien, who sounded genuinely curious.
“Because the Army and the Marine Corps listened to our Congress and the president. If we'd held our unit integrity and told ourselves, ‘We're here to fight until this thing is done,’ everything would have turned out very differently.”
Hien's presence beside me felt quietly prevailing. My legs traded my body weight back and forth. Finally I asked my father, almost entirely for Hien's sake, “Do you really believe that?”
He stared at me. “I know that.”
“So in your view the war was lost because of poor leadership. Intelligent people making poor decisions.”
“No. It has very little to do with intelligence, per se. It has to do with understanding. They would send over colonels and generals every six months to get them trained or retrained or get them ‘active’ in things…. None of these men had any idea of what we, especially the enlisted men, were going through. People were getting shot all the time. We may have had a lot here at Chu Lai, but it was a different story out in the field. Marines were always starved and scrounging for resources. Half the time we were living in holes in the ground or scraping around to find enough plywood to put a floor underneath our people so they wouldn't get leeches in their feet or in their boots. And my father-in-law, Colonel T., who I loved very much, was sitting up there in Danang having lobster and steak every night, formulating grand thoughts on how the war could be won. True. Do you know how many colonels died in combat in World War Two? Hundreds. Hundreds. Do you know how many died in combat in Vietnam? Hardly any.”
His sudden, growled tone startled me, and I lowered the tape recorder from his mouth. “Hey, Dad—you okay? We can stop.”
But he went on: “The one thing we were taught, and the one thing we taught: initiative, initiative, initiative. Mission. Find your mission. You find your mission, make your battle plan, and accomplish the mission no matter what it takes. The mission is paramount. Every case of human waste, or casualties, or suffering—that is beside the point. Do you understand what that means? You will accomplish your mission. And this is okay—this is expected—as long as the mission makes sense. As long as you can accomplish the mission with reasonableness. But when you have to destroy a company of men, or a battalion of men, or kill civilians, or keep choppers parked for the fucking news media, most men with a conscience, with a heart and soul, most men will say, ? have to do this another way’ The final analysis is we fragmented, in my opinion. Our high command was playing with sandlots, moving tanks around, and never being on the ground, with us. I never saw a general go out on any patrol—not in a truck, not on foot. They deemed it unnecessary. And that's where they and their South Vietnamese counterparts, in my view, failed us. Rank is basically bullshit. In combat, respect is paramount. And when a general does not respect a lieutenant and orders him about summarily, with no idea of the tactical situation, no idea, just giving orders, because he thinks that's the right thing to do—well, quite frankly, we began to ignore them.”
“Dad, I'm going to be honest and say you're freaking me out a little.”
“Well, what do you want to talk about? The rights and wrongs of war? I don't know much about that. I don't even know that much about war. Except that I was in one, apparently.”
We made our way back to the car, but soon all three of us stopped to pee. While voiding at our distant back-turned coordinates it began raining again, harder than the misty satin aerosol that often lingered in the air throughout a Vietnamese morning and early afternoon. My father had not freaked me out moments before. What he had done was irritate me. I was irritated by how certain he was of having been failed here in Vietnam. Irritated too by how he had apparently never paused to wonder if he had been failed because the mission—the initiative—he and his fellows had all been so determined to implement was in fact wrong and immoral. He had no idea how much of him I knew: the many kindnesses he had done for people back home and never discussed, the time he had dived over three pews to come to the aid of a boy who had fainted during mass, that on every trash day he still insisted on emptying the garbage cans of his lurassically aged neighbors even though they had habitually threatened to shoot my father's dogs for running around in their yard. Here is the recording that greets those who telephone lohn “Nice Guy” Bissell at work: “This is lohn Bissell. Thank you very much for calling. I'm sorry I missed your call. Your call is very important to me. I will return your call as soon as possible. Again, thank you very much for your call.” But how does one reconcile love when the object of one's love cannot, in one crucial moral arena, see the obvious? My decent father had killed men in this place. He had seen men killed. For him this whole country was a campus of death and loss. What on earth was I expecting of him? I looked down to see my dying arc of urine splash upon some shamrocky plants that, like tiny green fists, instantly folded in upon themselves. A brainless organism responding to stimulus from without. How practical a self-defense mechanism it suddenly seemed.
“Beware of snakes,” Hien said as we all zipped up.
“Did you see one?” This statement left my mouth at a decibel level somewhere between shout and scream. Unfortunately none of the nearest trees looked climbable.
Hien smiled. “Maybe I heard one over there.”
“Are you winding me up? Tell me you're kidding.”
“Most snakes are not dangerous,” Hien said. “You know this, yes?”
“Cobras,” my father said.
Hien, nodding acceptingly: “Of course cobras are very dangerous.”
“Are there fucking cobras here?”
My father and Hien: “Yeah.”
I was now standing behind my father. “For Chri—why, then, are we walking here?”
Hien was still smiling. “Have you had the snake wine? You know the snake wine.”
“Snake wine?” my father asked as I gauged his willingness to allow me to ride piggyback upon his shoulders back to the car. “No, what is it?”
“It means we have the snake blood with wine. Very strong.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “It makes your cock hard, right?”
“If,” my father said, “it doesn't fall off after you drink it.”
“Sometime we can go to the snake restaurant.”
“No thank you, Hien. That dead snake we saw earlier was almost enough to cause me to poo.”
We were walking again, my eyes peeled down to their rods and cones as I scanned the underbrush. My father said, “You know, cobras r
earing up out of the bush around here used to scare the heck out of me. Cobras and our little friends who eat them.”
“Which friends are those? They sound terrific.”
“Mongooses,” my father said. “Mongoose-cobra battle breaks down to about sixty-forty in favor of the mongoose, as I understand it.”
“I thought that was just a legend.”
“Absolutely not. The mongoose wins about sixty percent of the time. They never quit.”
Hien: “I have never seen this.”
My father: “If I were a betting man, I'd bet on the mongoose. I'd bet on the Marine—that's a mongoose.”
“A Marine is a mongoose,” I said.
“That's correct.”
“You're a very strange man.”
We passed the berry-picking women again, still as willing as ever to smile. While my father walked ahead, I told Hien that I wondered, sometimes, what it was like for older Vietnamese to watch people like my father and me traipse around their country. Despite its growing economy (which I dutifully recognized), I understood, I told Hien, that the average Vietnamese citizen's life was still filled with doubt and want. Might not the sight of our cameras, clean clothes, and sunny faces cause some resentment? How sincere, I tried to ask, were those smiles?
Hien explained that Vietnam had basically been on its own from 1975 to 1985, a time most remember as far more terrible than that of the American War. “The saddest years,” as Hien called them, found Vietnam embroiled in two more conflicts a mere half decade after Saigon's fall. The first was against Cambodia, in 1978. The Vietnamese Communists’ former client, Pol Pot, after killing, working to death, or starving one in every eight Cambodians, exacerbated the historic tensions, temporarily hidden by Communism, between Vietnam and Cambodia by unwisely launching some cross-border raids into Vietnam. Vietnam's Le Duan (who was not innocent of antagonizing Cambodia) finally had enough of this and ordered 100,000 Vietnamese troops into Cambodia to overthrow the Khmer Rouge.
For the heroic action of ending what the Vietnamese Communists themselves called “the most monstrous genocide ever,” the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was rewarded with the status of International Pariah. In what is perhaps the most disturbing moment ever in U.S. foreign relations, the Carter administration refused to recognize Cambodia's Vietnamese-installed government in favor of the Khmer Rouge. Vietnam wound up occupying Cambodia for eleven years and in doing so lost thousands of soldiers: Vietnam's Vietnam. China, long irritated by Vietnam's intransigence, decided to avenge its deposed allies in Phnom Penh and ordered several hundred thousand invading troops into northern Vietnam. This invasion, China's eleventh of Vietnam, did not stir one peep of protest from the United States. China's Communism had always been too extreme for the Vietnamese, and the invasion rallied the Vietnamese people behind their government to an extent not seen during even the American War. (From California, Nguyen Cao Ky volunteered to fight for the Vietnamese Communists.) Chinese troops, who had not known a battlefield since the Korean conflict, managed to move roughly twenty miles into Vietnamese territory and lost a thousand men for every mile. After seventeen days, China withdrew— making Vietnam the only nation on earth that can claim to have militarily defeated three of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. The ten years following Vietnam's Vietnam and its Chinese invasion left what was already one of the poorest countries on the planet in straits so economically dire that many Soviet advisers reportedly preferred to be dispatched to Africa than suffer placement in the world's newest socialist republic.
“And so,” Hien told me, “you and your father do not bother the old women at all. You mean something to them. Do you know?”
“Tell me.”
“Vietnam is no longer alone.”
We soon headed for a place my father had no wish to see. This was the Son My Memorial, found six miles outside the provincial capital of Quang Ngai. Once upon a time Son My was a subdistrict village divided into several hamlets: Truong Dinh, Tu Cung, Co Luy, and My Lai. The most famous of these hamlets was Tu Cung, though it was and continues to be popularly misidentified as My Lai due to errors of designation made by the U.S. military. It was in Tu Cung/My Lai where, in 1968, the most notorious U.S. war crimes against Vietnamese villagers took place.
My tape recorder, yet again, was pulled from my backpack, and I turned to my father. “Let's put this on the record: You did not want to come see the Son My Memorial.”
My father sighed. “It wasn't my first choice.”
“Why not?”
“Well, it's sort of a … it's just such a sad thing, that's all. But I guess we're going to do it, and that's fine with me.”
There were various reasons why my father did not want to visit Son My, some easily grasped, others less so. One of the “less so” reasons was my father's unaccountable friendliness with Captain Ernest Medina, who commanded Charlie Company, the unit within the 11th Brigade, 23rd Light Infantry Division responsible for many of the My Lai killings. Medina, a Mexican American whose promising military career was gar-roted by My Lai, eventually wound up settling in northern Wisconsin, and occasionally my father would see him. My father had always maintained that Medina was a “great guy” who claimed to have given no order for what happened and had no explanation for it.
On the way to Son My, we passed bean fields and schoolkids in their white shirts and red kerchiefs. The road, already narrow, was tightened further by lingering floodwater courtesy of last night's torrent. In each standing pool the reflection of the tall palms seemed like a mirrored gateway into another, darker dimension. Quang Ngai was a poor province, and parts of it looked locust-scoured. Despite its proximity to the ocean and its rough beauty, Quang Ngai had always been poor and was largely known for its bricklayers. During the war it had also been one of the most revolutionary provinces in South Vietnam.
Over the last three and a half decades many commentators have attempted to minimize the ethical catastrophe of the massacre by pointing out, accurately, that Quang Ngai was largely sympathetic to the NLE In their day Quang Ngai's people ferociously resisted Vietnam's Chinese, lapanese, and French occupiers. North Vietnam's prime minister Pham Van Dong was from Quang Ngai. In 1948, Ho Chi Minh lauded the people of Quang Ngai for becoming one of the first southerly provinces to rid itself of the French. The village of Son My was itself built by the Viet Minh. During the American War it was said that more NLF recruits came out of Quang Ngai than any other province. In his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O’Brien, who patrolled Quang Ngai, refers to the “patently hostile” faces of the area's inhabitants. Between 1965 and 1968, 70 percent of the province's villages were destroyed by Korean, U.S., and South Vietnamese forces; Quang Ngai's civilian casualties ran as high as 50,000 a year.
Amid the unpaved side roads, the shabby and closely arranged homes, the chicken coops and pigpens, and the kicked-up miasmas of dust, an occasional bit of floating-past visual incongruity caught one's eye: a shop with a gleamingly white wedding dress displayed behind its dirty front window, a Vietnamese blacksmith peppered in hot flecks of orange spark as he lowered a piece of metal onto a blurrily spinning wheel, bandanna-wearing teenagers holding children they looked far too young to have given birth to, and, finally, a health clinic built in part with funds donated by U.S. Army veterans of the Vietnamese War. My Lai had a new elementary school as well, also built with funds partially supplied by American veterans.
“How hard was it,” I asked my father, “to deal with people who may have liked Americans, or at least were nice to you, and yet know that they often turned around and gave shelter to NLF guerrillas?”
“They had no choice.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Yet again I decided I would not challenge him. While one can investigate the war's history and find anecdotal evidence of numerous South Vietnamese supporting the insurgency—such as the villa
ger who told American surveyors in 1967 that the NLF knew “how to please the people; they behave politely so people feel like they are more favored…. [T]hey do not thunder at the people like government soldiers”—it has also been estimated that as much as 30 percent of the NLF's guerrillas were forcibly recruited. It was confusing. Of course it was confusing. Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese with an extremely sympathetic view of the United States, addresses American war veterans directly in her memoir when she writes, “almost everyone in the country you tried to help resented, feared, and misunderstood you.” When discussing the war in Vietnam, which in many cases meant attempting to chart the infinity of human nature, there were few categorical statements that could not be obviated by another, equally truthful categorical statement. Thus I said, both to my father and myself, “It's frustrating.”
“It was. It was horrible. Terrible.”
“Do you think that's part of the reason why American morale got so bad?”
He shook his head. “We didn't have bad morale. That happened later. That process took a few years.”
“What's your worst memory?”
“Losing people. Seeing people get killed. Packing ‘em up, shipping ‘em home, writing letters.”
“Like your and Phil's friend Walt Levy?”
“A good friend. A great man.”
“So how does one go on? After losing a friend, I mean.”
“You just do. You put it behind you. That's called discipline.”
“Did you ever have any thoughts while you were here about getting out, about leaving?”
“Hell no.”
“Not you personally—the United States. Did you ever, in a low moment, think, ‘This is insane. What are we doing here?’ “
“I never did. What I thought was, ‘We have to do better.’ That proved to be impossible.”
“Because of things like the My Lai massacre.”
For the first time since we had begun speaking—my father typically communicated his dislike of certain topics by engaging in laconism or staring fixedly away—he looked over at me. “What you don't understand is that things like My Lai happened all the time, only on a much smaller scale. All the time.”