The Father of All Things

by Tom Bissell

  The storm windows slammed again, and I flinched. I looked over. At the range itself a Chinese girl in a coral blue shirt was shooting an Ml6, laughing between bursts, while her parents took pictures and her even younger siblings hopped about excitedly.

  “What kind of guns can you shoot?” I asked the woman.

  She rattled them off: AK-47, M16, M14, M3, M60, Ml, Thompson, grease gun, sten gun. “One dollar, one bullet,” she said. “Thirty dollars for magazine.”

  I looked back at my father.

  “You're serious about this,” he said. This was not a question.

  “I just want to see what it's like.”

  “It's not like anything. It's what it is. You've fired shotguns. It's like that, except faster.”

  I handed the woman a fifty-dollar bill and walked after her to the weapons procurement counter.

  “Tommy!” my father called after me.

  I looked at the selection of weapons. Some were mounted on the wall, others simply propped against it. All were old and had a dim, ancient-chalkboard hue. The AK-47s looked strange and anonymous without their banana clips. The M 14s were as long and unfussy as a hunting rifle. The M16's carrying handle gave it a vaguely briefcase air. Chests and buckets of ammunition were stacked behind the men and women sitting at the counter. Every tourist here, save for me, was Asian. As I deliberated, hundreds of dollars were being exchanged for handfuls of shiny, pointed bullets. My father was now beside me, still shaking his head. “So,” I said to him, “what gun should I fire?”

  He rubbed his face hard, revealing the split-second horror of skin pulled away from its facial musculature and his eye sockets’ wet red ocular rims. When his hand fell away he stared at me. Suddenly he was a Marine. “What specifically are you looking to do?”

  “I'm looking to shoot a cool gun. Did you carry an Ml6, or did you have a sidearm?”

  “I carried a sidearm and a grease gun. And I usually rode with an M14 in the backseat. A very fine weapon. When we got to Chu Lai, they replaced our M14s with the M16, which I didn't like as much. So I managed to hold on to my M14.”

  “Why didn't you like the Ml6?”

  “For rapid fire it was fine. The bullet was also very fast. But it wasn't real good for jungle fighting because the bullet was such a small caliber that if it hit anything—a leaf, anything—it would be deflected. The M14 round would go where you put it.”

  My father's rejection of the M16 (originally called the AR-15 and created by Colt) was not uncommon. Its surplus of plastic parts led many soldiers to call the weapon “my Mattel toy.” In addition, the alpha generation of M16 was so “plagued by stoppages,” one retired officer put it, that many units requested the reissue of the older, less defective M14. Broken, internally melted M 16s were sometimes found upon the battlefields of Vietnam next to dead American grunts. The House Armed Services Subcommittee issued at least one devastating report attacking the military for widely issuing such a faulty, untested rifle. The malfunctions, it was determined, had their origin in the fact that the weapon had been tested with one kind of gunpowder and issued for battlefield usage with another.

  “Is it true that some men threw their Ml6s away and replaced them with enemy AK-47s?”

  “I never saw that, but I wouldn't doubt it. The AK doesn't break down, it's uncomplicated, it's very easy to maintain, you can get it as dirty as you want, and parts for it are pretty simple to manufacture. It's a good rifle. The bullet is large and light and doesn't go very fast, and it's not as accurate as you'd like, but the barrel is bored in such a way that the bullet tumbles. So when it hits a bone the bone usually shatters.”

  “Great. That settles it. I'm taking the AK.”

  “You're taking the AK,” my father said. Again, this was not a question. “You know, all this time, I've been kidding—but this clinches it. I really do believe you're a Communist.”

  I was handed fifty dollars’ worth of AK-47 ammunition and protective headphones. Once I put the headphones on, it became clear that they were not in the least insulated against sound. I then realized they were not protective headphones but rather headphones that had been liberated from a home stereo system. For all the insulation these headphones provided, they might as well have given me a bathrobe. I went back to the counter. “Don't you have better headphones?” The man to whom I put this question cupped a hand around his ear and asked that I repeat it, so apparently not.

  Every one of the range's dozen firing stands was covered by a little thatched roof. Most of the weapons were attached to their firing stand; some were not. Down at the far end of the range a squat Japanese man with a gorilloid frame was going to town with an unattached sten gun, the French weapon of choice during the First Indochina War. He fired in quick, nasty little bursts, the muzzle flashing fire. All he had to do to create a serious international incident was turn forty-five degrees to his right. I was guided to the AK stand, where a pith-helmeted older Vietnamese man was waiting. I gave him my ammunition and in seconds he loaded the gun and savagely yanked back its bolt. “Single shot or rock and roll?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Single fire or automatic,” my father said. I turned. He was standing directly behind me, on the other side of a small fence.

  I turned back to my guerrilla instructor. “Let's try rock and roll.”

  He flipped some tiny lever and, with trepidation, I approached the rifle. My earlier excitement was somewhat diluted by the fact that I had no conception of what to expect once I pulled the trigger. Firing a shotgun under my father's tutelage had been a long time ago. I leaned against the firing stand and felt the rifle comfortably fill my arms and hands. One did not hold a rifle, it dawned on me, so much as embrace it. The sight was a tiny black square with a little gouge cut into it. The targets: an elephant, a lion, and a tiger. I lined up the elephant only to be interrupted by my instructor. “Right eye,” he said. “Not left eye. Right eye.” I was aiming with the wrong eye. The fingers of my right hand were wrapped firmly around the stock. I extended my index and tried to wrap it around the trigger, which I somehow managed to miss. I was thus forced to crane my head around and sight-guide my finger into the iron ring that surrounded the trigger.

  “You're doing great,” my father said. “Can't find the trigger? No problem.”

  “Take up slack,” my instructor said.

  I turned to him and in the process managed to knock my protective headphones askew. “What?”

  “Take up slack. With finger.” Very gently he placed his finger over mine and pushed until my finger was flush against the trigger. “Okay. Good now.”

  I pulled. The multiple recoils slammed the rifle hard into my shoulder. The sound itself was monstrous eardrum vibrato, a long loud brrrrrrd. My eyes had involuntarily slammed shut. When I opened them, the rifle, for some reason, was aimed at the sun. Smoke leaked out of the barrel and the chamber and daggered into my nostrils—an industrious firework smell. My guide hand was covered with sooty black flecks. “Holy shit,” I said. “How many rounds was that?”

  “Five,” my instructor said.

  “I have forty-five of those left?”

  “Yes. Forty-five.”

  Jean-Luc Godard once wrote that the problem with war films was that, when experienced onscreen, war was inevitably invigorating, a sense-surround of exhilaration. Some tiny experiential sliver of that Godardian exhilaration had just passed through me. But I was also alarmed. I had felt the bullets’ launch in every tendon and joint of my body. In this way many have linked firing a weapon to the male experience of orgasm. I could now say that I did not agree. What I had just done had not felt good. It had felt powerful, and dreadfully awakening, but not good. I suddenly could not think of an activity I would place farther from the sexual act than firing an automatic weapon. But then I was not a psychopath. At least, not after five bullets.

  “Now imagine,” my father piped up, “that twenty guys are firing back at you, and people everywhere are screaming.”
/>   I fired again and this time managed to keep my eyes open. I had been expecting to see a little puff of kicked-up dirt behind my targeted elephant (I had given up on the idea of actually hitting it), but my three bullets had struck the dirt with such force it resembled the detonation of a grenade. Then I fired again.

  “Good!” my instructor said. “You hit elephant! Good! Lion now! Lion!”

  I fired again, my ears and nerves still not adjusted to the sound. It felt as though, each time I fired, a newly overwhelmed segment of my brain quietly powered down. I suddenly understood the Vietnamese proverb: “Deaf people are not scared of guns.” Next to me the Chinese girl was still firing. Her M16 made a completely different sort of sound from my AK-47: a sshhhhtt edged front and back with weird sonic suction.

  “Good! Lion again!”

  I fired again. Some quick hummingbird sensation darted around the periphery of my conscience, and I supposed this was shame.

  “Lower!”

  I fired again.

  “Good! Now try tiger!”

  It is thought that fifty thousand bullets were fired for every enemy soldier killed in Vietnam. Which meant I could have spent $50,000 here before reaching the equivalent of one enemy dead. During one particularly trigger-happy month, the U.S. military fired a trillion bullets in Vietnam.

  “Good! Higher! Get tiger!”

  I kept firing, more calmly now, taking my time and thinking about what was taking place inside this weapon: the ejection of shells, the gas collection, the tiny arrangements of force, the physics of death. When a bullet hits a human being (or an elephant, lion, or tiger), the kinetic-energy transfer is so intense that an “instantaneous internal steam explosion,” according to one authority, kills all surrounding tissue. This is called cavitation. When a bullet hits bone or teeth, the resultant human “secondary fragments” can kill someone standing nearby. An AK-47 or M16 round that hits someone in the head can create a shock wave inside the skull so powerful that the brain is vomited out of the exit wound.

  “Good!”

  I stopped firing and turned around to look at my father. His shirt was blue, a silver pen peeking from his pocket. The buckle of his thick brown belt was miscentered. He shook his head at me. His eyes were bunchy, grim; his smile was both lenient and unforgiving. He seemed taller and thinner—long-limbed, like a cowboy—than I usually pictured him. His hair was grayer. The rest of the range's firing had stopped for a moment, and wind sailed through the jungle around us like an invisible convoy of sound. The breeze lifted the peninsular brown remnant of my father's hairline and flipped it; it hung there, off his forehead, like a fern. I looked at him and he at me. This gulf between us: Was it just the war? Could I ever close it? Certain kinds of experience were not transferable, and some belonged only to us. If there were such a thing as a soul, perhaps this gulf between all people—lovers, friends, foes, fathers, sons— was its airless residence. Something coldly interior swiped at my ribs: if we were ineffably both what we experienced and more than what we experienced, if there were mysteries, why, then, was I firing this gun? I asked my instructor, “How many rounds do I have left?”

  He was smiling. “I think five.”

  I stepped back from the gun and took off my headphones. “I'm done,” I said.

  An hour before my father's taxi took him to Tan Son Nhut Airport, we were finishing our dinner in the outdoor garden of a District One restaurant that my father had been told was good for seafood. It was. We had devoured plates of squid and coconut-battered shrimp, and squirted each other with incidental citric fire while wringing out our lemons over our spiny brown-shelled lobsters, and now we sat quietly, drinking tiny cups of Vietnamese coffee. At a nearby table a rich young Saigonese couple sat turned away from each other, talking on their cell phones, while, next to us, a young Vietnamese woman occasionally leaned across a candlelit table and fork-fed her older Australian date. Next door to the restaurant was a basketball court. Its lights threw up into the sky a bright yellow borealis, and the steady thumping dribbles were as hypnotic as a metronome. We had discussed little during dinner. I was sad to see him leave, and I knew he was sad to go. Beyond that, there seemed little to talk about.

  “Do you think,” I finally said, setting down my coffee, “that this trip was cathartic for you?”

  He rubbed his fingers together as he thought this over. “It's been pleasant, it's been wonderful. I don't know if it's been cathartic.”

  “Do you think it's going to help you with any of the lingering bad feelings you still have about the war?”

  “I don't know if I have any lingering bad feelings. I told you that before we started.”

  “And I told you I didn't believe you.”

  “If I have them, I'm not aware of them. Honestly, Tommy. I'm not.”

  “When you drink, though—they come out. Surely you recognize that.”

  “Well, okay. Then now I'll just drink and not talk about the war.”

  I laughed. “You know what I mean.”

  He laughed too. We laughed together. My father's open mouth revealed a top row of large straight teeth and a bottom row that had the jagged dentition of a saw put to ill use. “Okay,” he finally said.

  We listened to a few swished jumpers and the low, giggling conversation next to us. My father blew into his coffee.

  “When,” I asked, “do you think the bad feelings started to go away?”

  His free hand shot up and flicked back. “I think they just did. I couldn't tell you when.”

  “You've mellowed a ton since I was a kid. I know that. You used to scare the hell out of me.”

  “And I'm very sorry about that. It makes me feel terrible, knowing I put you through that.”

  “No, that's not what I mean. I understand why you were the way you were. What I'm interested in is the process of letting all those feelings go.”

  He shook his head. “It's just time. That's all it is. When you focus less on it and it's not on the news and you've got a family and you've got other interests, everything changes. It just sort of dissipates, goes away. I will tell you that sometimes I see those movies and read the books, and it brings back the pain. And that hurts. But I can deal with it now.”

  “Right. Okay. That's what I'm trying to get at. Is it really just time? It's not recognizing that the war was different from what you thought?”

  “That's politics, and I have nothing to say about politics. At least not as they concern the war. I'm sorry. I know you want me to tell you I think the war was wrong. But I don't.”

  “I don't want you to tell me you think the war is—”

  His glare silenced me. “However, in the end, I think, after twelve days here, I think, probably, in all likelihood, though I say this with some misgiving, I think, all in all, it's best that everything turned out the way it did.”

  “Really? You can say that?”

  “I can now.”

  “So how does that make you feel?”

  He looked away. “Eh. Sad that the whole thing occurred. But mostly understanding.” He seemed to think about this word. His eyebrows lifted and stayed there.

  “Understanding, you mean, that the war wasn't your story, or an American story, but a different story, a Vietnamese story, in which you only played a small and terrible part?”

  “Let's not go crazy. Just understanding. You can't predict the future. What would we have done? Say we won everything here, took over all the country's provinces, crushed the Communists. What would we have done? The government was corrupt, and too many people hated the government. Who would we have appointed? When you hear the folks, like Hien, we've been talking to … you've seen how they talk about reunification. It means something to them. That's what I mean about understanding. I see their faces. This is such a happier place than it was when I was here.”

  “It's amazing to hear you say that, Dad. It really is. I know it's hard for you to—”

  “No, it's not. Not now.”

  Before I could pursue th
is, the restaurant's manager came over to our table. He was a short, balding, turtlelike man wearing a silver dress shirt and a black tie. It appeared that one of his waitresses had mentioned to him that she had overheard us talking about the war, and he now informed my father that he was a former ARVN soldier and had worked in intelligence during the war. He wanted to thank us for eating here, pass along his good tidings, and wish my father a pleasant time in Vietnam. The manager was speaking perfect English, albeit with a strong Vietnamese inflection. Nevertheless, my father had out his Vietnamese phrasebook and quickly found the Vietnamese word for “veteran.” Yes, the manager said, smiling, when my father showed him the word. My father stood and embraced his fellow veteran. The manager, clearly surprised, patted my father on the back. This man and my father, I noticed, were balding in the exact same pattern. After they pulled apart, my father's hands remained upon the man's shoulders, while the man held my father by his elbows. I looked at them, these two men who had fought for a cause no longer understood in the United States and officially disdained in Vietnam. Several of the waitresses were looking at them and whispering to one another.

  “The war is over,” my father said.

  “Yes,” the manager told him. “It's good to forget, to put it behind.”

  “I drank, and cried, and drank, and nothing worked. Now I'm here. In your wonderful country.”

  “It's good you're here. Very good.”

  “The bad memories—”

  “Oh, many bad memories.”

  “The bad memories,” my father said, “like this.” He then pantomimed taking his brain out of his head, slipped the imaginary brain it into his shirt pocket, and slyly patted it.

  The manager laughed, and then obliged my father with an identical pantomime. “Can't forget, though,” he said suddenly. “Not really.” If he had worked in ARVN intelligence, given what had happened to such people during reeducation, I imagined that his memories were indeed hard to forget. “But we're old men now.”

  My father cackled and stomped a foot. “Yes! Old men. We are. I can't believe it, but we are.”