by Tom Bissell
“Really?” He touched his temple, a lagoon of perspiration. He quickly wiped his fingers on his shirt. “Well, maybe a little.”
“How do you feel about the old Revolutionary Force now?”
I was joking, not really expecting an answer, but he looked at his camera as he turned it over in his hands. “We were all soldiers. They suffered terribly, you know, compared to us. Brave people. Committed. To their country. We sort of… lost that.”
“I'm sorry,” I said, surprising myself.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”
“One of the books I read says that World War Two taught its generation that the world is dark but essentially just. Vietnam taught its generation that the world is absurd.”
“That's horseshit. Forgive me, but that's just not true. What Vietnam taught me was the seven Ps: ‘Proper prior planning prevents piss-poor performance.’ “
“Okay. But it should be the six Ps, shouldn't it? Since one is a compound adjective.”
My father leaned forward to address Hien and Truong. “Would you stop the car? I'd like your help beating my son.”
Tuy Phuoc was less a village than a series of islands spread across a large plain now completely flooded by the seasonal rains. We rode among these islands along a long straight path that cleared the greedy waterline by only a few inches. Each island was a little node of Swiss Family Robinson-type existence: a modest house, a collapsing wooden fence, a damp sandy yard, a small dock, a wooden boat tied up to it. Plastic bags and limp old bicycle-tire linings hung with obscure meaning from the branches of several trees. Within the thick jungle, pink and yellow flowers, as bright as seashells, popped out at the eye from their dark green backdrops. Everywhere people were fishing; a few laughing children rode their bicycles through knee-deep water. My father mentioned that, forty years ago, all of these houses had been thatched huts. Hien jumped in to say, with some pride, that the government had been building and modernizing all of Vietnam's villages since 1975.
The narrow road was crammed with pedestrians. Water buffaloes farted and snorted beside us, while above the sky was a spacious gray cemetery of dead clouds. The surrounding floodwater was tea-colored where it was deep and green where it was shallow. As we moved toward the center of Tuy Phuoc, the severity of the area's recent flooding appeared quite serious. I watched men take off their sport coats, fold them over their shoulder, and with a snowshoeing gait wade through deep puddles to their front doors. Cars submerged up to their windshields were parked beside the road. People sat on the edges of their porches, pants rolled up to their knees, their dangling legs idly kicking at the water. Truong plowed through flooded-out sections of the road, vigorously splashing those walking beside us, none of whom even looked up. Flooding, the cultural marinade of rural Vietnam, was of little matter to these people.
“Viet Cong villages,” my father said suddenly, looking around at Tuy Phuoc's islands. “All of these.”
I imagined that coming down this road, even in a heavily armed convoy, must have been nerve-flaying. One slender path through a tropic of hostility, and nowhere to go but forward or back. We finally parked when the road was too flooded out to continue and stood next to the car. My father was wounded, he guessed, perhaps a hundred yards ahead of where we were forced to stop, just beyond a stand of trees as thick as green toothbrush bristles. He was visibly jittery and lit a cigarette to distract himself. On either side of the flooded-out road lingered a crowd of Vietnamese. They called to one another across the water, waving and laughing. Every few minutes some brave soul mounted a scooter charge through the floodwaters, the water parting before his tires with Mosaic instantaneity. The few who did not go fast enough saw their scooters conk out in the middle of their journey, and to cheerful catcalls they sheepishly pushed their scooters across the remainder of the submerged road.
Tuy Phuoc, I gathered, was not much of a tourist town, and for the most part we were left alone. But nearly everyone was looking at us. The people of Tuy Phuoc were short and damp and suntanned in a vaguely unhealthy way. The women smiled, the men nodded civilly, and the children rushed at us before thinking better of it and retreating behind their mothers’ legs. One old woman sitting in the jamb of her tiny pink house spat black betel-nut juice into the soil.
“So,” I said to my father, “this is it, right?”
He looked around, smoke leaking from his nostrils. “This is the place.”
My tape recorder was activated yet again. “You want to tell me what happened?” This was mostly a courtesy, since I knew what happened. My father was shot—in the back, buttock, arm, and shoulder—at the beginning of a roadside melee and was dragged to safety by a black Marine. One of the things I had long admired about my father was his absence of racial animosity, a fairly uncommon trait among the men of rural Michigan. I had always attributed this to the black Marine who had saved his life. I identically credited my own youthful stridency on racial matters—I was forever jumping down the throats of my parents’ dinner guests or high school friends whenever the word “nigger” made its unlovely entrance from stage right—to this same mysterious savior.
“We were on a search-and-destroy mission,” my father explained. “We entered Tuy Phuoc in a convoy. After twenty minutes of driving we found the road was cut by a huge earthen mound. The VC obviously knew we were coming, so we were all very suspicious. We fanned out. I was at the head of the convoy and called up the engineers. They were going to blow up the mound and rebuild the road so we could continue. About fifteen men came up and I turned around to talk to the gunnery sergeant from the lead infantry platoon, and the mound exploded. Inside the dirt they'd packed a bunch of steel and shrapnel. The only reason I'm here is that I turned around to speak to the gunnery sergeant. I remember saying, ‘Gunny, I'll go back and get some more equipment.’ You know, shovels, stuff like that. The bomb caught Gunny in the face, and I went flying through the air. Then I tried to get up. Couldn't. There were people lying all over the place. I think fifteen were wounded. Gunny was the only guy killed. My platoon sergeant hauled me into a ditch, and they field-dressed me and jammed me full of morphine and then flew in the choppers. I was very fucked up, in total shock. I had two hundred separate wounds. They counted ‘em. My left arm caught the brunt of the blast. I thought they were going to have to take it off. I thought I was going to die. I knew I was going to die. I said to myself, ‘It's all done.’ I took my pistol out with my one good hand. I took it out and I gave it to Scotty. I said, ‘You're in charge. You've got the platoon. Lead them well. Good-bye.’ I remember that everyone was crying. So that ended my war for a while.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, the tape recorder whirring. “I thought you were shot.”
“No, I never got shot. Which is fine by me.”
“But that's not the story you told me.”
He looked at me. “I don't think I ever told you that story.”
“Then why do I remember you being shot, and a black Marine dragging you to safety?”
“I have no idea.”
“Was the sergeant who pulled you into the ditch black?”
“I don't think so. I honestly don't remember.”
My father's sleeve was rolled up, and I was now looking at his left arm. Incredibly, I had never before noticed the scoring of crosshatched scar tissue running up and down his forearm or how thin his left arm seemed compared with his right. I had, however, many times, noticed the bright pink nickel-sized scars on his bicep and his shoulder blade, the small keloidal lightning bolt on his neck. When I was young I used to stare at these obvious wounds and, sometimes, even touch them, my tiny fingers freshly alive to their rubbery difference in texture. For me they were little talismans, the faded proofs of an unimaginable past. But I had to admit, now, that I did not actually remember my father ever telling me he was shot, or that a black man had saved his life. I remembered telling that story myself but did not remember being told that story. At some point the story simply appeared in my mind. Why
did I create this story? Because it made my father heroic? In the emergency of growing up we all need heroes. But the father I grew up with was no hero to me, not then. He was too wounded in the head, too endlessly and terribly sad. Too funny, too explosive, too confusing. Heroes are uncomplicated. This makes them do that. The active heroism of my imaginary black Marine made a passive hero of my father; they huddled together, alongside a road in the Vietnam of my mind, shrouded in nitroglycerin, the cordite of bravery. The story made sense of the senseless. But war does not make sense. War senselessly wounded everyone right down the line. A body bag fitted more than just its intended corpse. Take the 58,000 American soldiers lost in Vietnam and multiply by four, five, six—and only then does one begin to realize the damage this war had done. (Project outward from the millions of slain Vietnamese and see, for the first time, an entire continent of loss.) War, when necessary, was unspeakable. When unnecessary, it was unforgivable. It was not an occasion for heroism. It was an occasion only for survival and death. To regard war in any other way only guaranteed its reappearance.
I studied my father, who was still smoking and peering around. Suddenly he appeared very old. He did not look bad. He was in fact in better physical shape than I—a topic of persistent agony for me and ceaseless delight for him—but he was older-looking than I had ever seen him before. His neck had begun to give up and sag, his eyes were bigger and more yellowy, the long wolfish hair at the base of his throat was gray. Age was squeezing him, shrinking him, bleeding him of color; age was doing what age does. I was twenty-nine, six years older than my father was when he was wounded. Could I really know the young man who had gone flying through the air, ripped apart by a booby trap? Could I even know this man, still flying, and in some ways still ripped apart? Ultimately our lives are only partially ours. Crucial pieces of our personal mythologies are shed at every turn. The parts of our lives that change most are those that intrude with mythic vividness into the lives of those we love: our parents, our children, our brothers and sisters. As these stories overlap they change, but we have no voice as to how or why. One by one our stories are dragged away from us, pulled into the ditches of shared human memory. They are saved, but they are changed. One day my father will be gone but for the parts of him I remember and the stories he has told me. That man, and those stories, will be different from what my brother will remember, or what my stepmother or mother will remember. What else did I not know? How much else about him had I gotten wrong? What have I not asked? And looking at him I wanted him never to go. Why did I have to lose him? I want him always to be here.
There was too much left for us to talk about.
A lone Vietnamese man shoelessly wandered over to greet us. His chewed-up T-shirt looked to have been on the receiving end of a moth offensive, and the legs of his dirty blue trousers terminated just above his calves. His hairless legs and arms were so thin and brown they looked made of teak. As he and my father shook hands and (with Hien's assistance) chatted, I realized that this man was around my father's age. It was in fact not at all beyond possibility that this man had personally wired the booby trap that nearly killed my father. But his solar friendliness was not feigned, and beneath its insistent emotional heat I could see my father's discomfort soften and wilt. He leaned in, ear first, to listen to Hien's translation, and within moments the man and my father were laughing over something together.
I listened to my father and his new Vietnamese friend talk respectfully around the small matter of having taken up arms against each other as young men: yes, my father had been to Vietnam before; no, the Vietnamese man had not always lived in Tuy Phuoc. Their conversation slid into a respectful silence, and they nodded and looked each other over. With a smile, the man suddenly asked my father what had brought him to Tuy Phuoc, since it was so far away from anything of note. For a long time my father thought about how to answer, looking up at the low gray clouds, a few small trapezoids of blue showing through. To Hien he finally said, “Tell him … tell him that, a very long time ago, I got hurt here.”
When we reached Nha Trang we opted to split up for the day: not a difficult decision. My father had spent five weeks in Nha Trang recuperating from his wounds, and I was beginning to sense that the more I questioned him the less he was able to contemplate his experience here. Contemplation is not an archaeology of explanation but the quiet solitary assembly of questions. After we had agreed to meet at 7 p.m. at something called the Nha Trang Sailing Club, my father and Hien went off to find the hospital in which he had physically recovered. I stuffed Duiker's Ho biography under my arm—I was marooned in the low 500s—and elected to wander the beaches and streets of Nha Trang.
Called by one writer “Nice in beggar's clothing,” Nha Trang still retained some of its French heritage, but these days the beggar was living on velvet. Its saltine beaches, the bright gray ocean, the dandelion yellows and laundered whites of the seaside resorts and shops, the haze along the horizon that shadowed the distant green hills with a soft shade of lavender—the city was a scrum of color. A wide and well-paved four-lane street separated the beach from most of Nha Trang's better hotels, some of them quite tall, which resulted in a Maui-like aura of tropical urbanity.
I headed for the beach, passing a billboard that said VIETNAM: THE DESTINATION FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM. There were few people here but many seashells, pieces of trash, and shredded old tires. (Tires, along with a dozen tied-together flip-flop sandals, are often used in coastal Vietnam as buoys.) A few miles off the coast I could make out through the haze some of Nha Trang's small slug-shaped outlying islands. Among them floated several fishing boats. Nha Trang's surf was so loud I had been able to hear it on the thirteenth story of our hotel; standing beside the ocean now was like having one's thoughts turn hydraulic. I abandoned the beach for a stroll through the city center and saw countless scuba-diving advertisements, massage parlors, and karaoke bars. Every settled part of Vietnam had at least a few karaoke bars. I was beginning to suspect that Vietnamese molecules had tiny karaoke bars inside of them. Deeper into the city the newer buildings were of the Lego Deco mold and surrounded by pointy iron gates. Tucked away between these fortresses were worn little shingle-roofed buildings, obvious vestiges of the French colonial presence. Here and there hung a few NHA BAN signs: House for Sale.
I sat down in a burgers-and-fries restaurant, the menu of which read, “We are happy to sever you.” On the menu's opposite side was a long jeremiad against pedophilia, which even in this “paradise,” it seemed, had “reared its ugly head.” As a word of warning it recounted one dismal Australian man's recent conviction in Sydney of molesting a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl in a Nha Trang swimming pool. Allowing those guilty of abusing Vietnamese children to face criminal charges back home was the result of a new international law whose mechanisms were being enthusiastically activated throughout Southeast Asia and in the nations of its most frequent tourists. I had read in Viet Nam News of at least three recent similar convictions. My wicker chair was planted right off the sidewalk, and before long a Vietnamese boy selling postcards and wearing a T-shirt with a large @ sign on it pestered me until I gave him 20,000 dong. After the boy left, a legless older man riding a bike he maneuvered by pumping a long red handle moved in. He handed me his card: “I am a Viet Nam veteran (ARVN) who lost both legs in a fight against the Charlies.” I gave him some money, too.
Nha Trang was the first city I had seen here where the streets appeared traveled more by Westerners than by Vietnamese. I was no travel bully or tourist hater, but finding oneself almost exclusively surrounded by other tourists (said the tourist eating a hamburger in Vietnam) had a way of frustrating one's interaction with a place. Overhearing a French couple attempting to talk down a cyclo driver from his two-dollar asking price; observing an American couple brush away some poor but friendly children; monitoring the progress of a Korean couple out to videographize every square inch of Nha Trang with their wallet-sized Sony Handycam; or watching the tour buses discharge their human c
argo at some place of significance, the passengers milling about like fanny-packed cattle, asking few questions before taking their obligatory photo. All had come chasing the same butterflies of beauty and fascination, yet no one had anything to say to anyone else. I missed my father already, and after finishing the Duiker book, I walked back to the hotel, napped to the sound of faraway surf until 6:45, and made my way over to the Nha Trang Sailing Club.
To enter, one passed through a tall wooden archway next to a scuba lessons shop and walked down a long breezeway to the restaurant proper. This open area was inconsistently covered by a fake thatched roof, from which a number of glowing orange lamps hung. The tables were low and onyx black. Several palm and coconut trees had been left standing around the restaurant's edges. A pool table shone like a hard green pool beneath a suspended rectangular light. Beyond was the club's porch, edged with low adobe walls and scattered with huge earthen pots sprouting cacti. The bar itself, where my father sat with his back to me, was the club's most expensively swaggering touch. It looked like a candlelit glen of wood and metal. A massive Foster's beer tap was prominently centered upon the bar like a bright blue idol. Behind the bar a trio of actor/model barkeeps glided before a backdrop of bourbons and vodkas and gins. I stood there looking at my father in his pressed green shirt and khaki pants, his ears gone burgundy from the wine he had already put away this evening. I was hesitant to approach him. He seemed so contentedly alone.
When I touched his back he turned, and suddenly his arms went around me. As he squeezed, his loose fists softly pounded my scapulae.
“This is so wonderful,” he said upon release. “Thank you for bringing me here. What a magnificent country.”