by Tom Bissell
“It was a long time ago.”
“And your country is unified.”
“Yes. It's good to be unified. Sadness and danger are all over now. The bad times are good times now.”
With a wave of his hand my father presented me to the man. “This is my son.”
“Your father is a good man,” the manager told me, smiling. “He loves you. I think he loves all people.”
My father threw up his hands. “Put it behind!” He was, for some reason, speaking with a Vietnamese accent. “All bad memories! Put it behind!”
THREE
The Children of the War Speak
A person who has lived through a great war is different from someone who never lived through any war. They are two different species of human beings. They will never find a common language, because you cannot really describe the war, you cannot share it, you cannot tell someone: Here, take a little bit of my war.
—RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI, THE SOCCER WAR
Believe it or not, I once had a high school teacher who took us out in the woods for an afternoon in order to teach us about the war. It was … oh, God, what was it? I guess I'd say that it was completely crazy. My teacher was one of these vets that refuses to eat Chinese food, always sits facing the door in any room, always announces why he's sitting facing the door in any room, and maintained—in class—that the United States did not lose the Vietnam War. Remember Kevin Kline's character in A Fish Called Wanda, who says Vietnam was “a tie”? That was him. He taught history. This is the Midwest, right?
So he has us out there. He makes me and a few other kids Viet Cong. I think he made all the students he didn't like Viet Cong, but I was the only girl guerrilla. He sends us to one side of the woods to hide with some Ziplocs filled with rice—orange Rice-a-Roni rice that his wife made. The students he assigned as U.S. infantry he has doing some other idiotic thing. Formations or whatever. I honestly don't even remember what they were doing. But they had Spam to eat. While we're running around in the woods with our Spam and Rice-a-Roni, he begins his lecture about the disadvantages Americans faced in Southeast Asia. The guy did this with his history classes every year.
My dad was a medic in Vietnam, and when I told him about our field trip he got this very sad look in his eyes. He sat me down and talked to me, for the first time, about the war. What did he tell me? Well, he said that war, all war, was basically cruelty and anyone who sought to justify it, or explain it, or rationalize it, was not worth listening to. We had this huge talk. My father had never opened up about the war before. Vietnam had always been this black hole or forbidden zone. Later I told my mom about what he'd said. She was shocked. He'd never really talked to her about it, not once in twenty-five years of marriage. Of course, little things came up, but nothing like what he told me. Can you believe it took this moron at my high school to get my dad to talk about it? I think it offended his sense of honor or something. Maybe that was the only good thing about that war. For all the men it made like my high school teacher, it made men like my father too. He was the gentlest person I've ever known.
Do I hate Americans? I know why you ask. Because now I'm a little angry while I'm talking to you. You know, I'll be honest and tell you I do hate them a little. A little. Not all Americans, but many. I think you hate us a little too. Why do I hate them? I hate them because they think they have suffered. A lot of them come here and they cry, but they forget what they did. I've seen this many times. But have they really suffered? Okay, yes, that's true, but not like us. My brother suffered. My mother suffered. My other brother died. My uncle died. They never found my father's body. Do you know how many members of our Party lost wives, sons, and daughters to American bombs? In our government there are many such people, and now they must welcome your country's investments. Have you thought about that? Would you want to do that?
You said yesterday you were surprised by how little anger you have felt here, but there is anger within all Vietnamese who were alive then. Most of us can let it go, some of us can't. Often I can. Most often I am able to do my job and smile and be a good person. But if I think of my brother long enough I am not such a good person anymore. How? He was hit by a bomb. My uncle too. No, different bombs. I don't blame you. It's not your fault. Do I blame your father? Did he drop the bomb? He was a Marine? Well, no, probably he didn't drop the bomb. I don't blame your father. I guess there is no blame.
Today I don't have any work, so I drink beer and smoke cigarettes. My days are very long. What was my brother's name? Triet. Yes, Triet. Today my little brother would be thirty-four years old.
For some reason I was always sad when I was growing up. I wasn't a good student, either. I had trouble with other kids. I fought, stole, and did a lot of other bad shit. Something always seemed to just eat at me. Now that I'm older, I think a lot of this had to do with my dad.
When he wasn't drunk, he was getting drunk. There were some serious drug problems when I was a kid, actually; he may have spent a few nights in jail. My dad couldn't maintain human relationships, for one thing. He had so much fury in him. It's an odd word to use, but I think it's an accurate one. Fury. Hate. Distrust. It came out in all different ways, but it was always totally undirected, though he was absolutely racist against any and all Asians. When he didn't have anything to do, he would walk around with panic in his eyes. He could never be alone. But no one could really stand being around him for long either. That should suggest some of my father's ongoing problems. But I love the guy, despite it all.
Who really knows how much of this is attributable to Vietnam? I'm not even sure how much combat he even saw. But from what I've read, that wasn't a big consolation, considering that at certain points in the war you were as liable to get killed at your desk in Saigon as you were out in the jungle. He's gotten better in the last few years. Better, not good. I doubt he'll ever be good. Good is not really within my father's potentiality, if you know what I mean. I could blame Vietnam for that. Sometimes I do. But in the end I don't know.
Mostly I remember bombs falling, airplanes coming. I remember always moving. My father was political. He was a farmer, then he was VC. My mother was not political. My brother was not political. We were poor. We were chased out of our home many times. Sometimes by the VC when my father was gone, sometimes by the bombs.
I remember, as a little girl, not believing I would survive. I remember that: thinking, “Tomorrow, I will die.” Can you imagine? Later when I went to the United States to study, many professors asked me, “Why do you want to come here? Don't you hate Americans?” I said, “Behind the soldiers, behind the governments, there are always hearts, families, memories, childhoods, pasts.” I wanted to know more about the people behind those U.S. soldiers. I wanted to learn about American culture. So I told those professors that the United States was not just for Vietnamese refugees. Communists are people, too!
I started to read short stories about the war, stories by American authors. I don't really like them, no. I suppose because I never recognize the war in those stories. The war in those stories…. That was not my war. My war was my mother crying, my brother crying, always moving.
When I was in fourth or fifth grade, I found a section of the library that had a bunch of books about the war, and there was this one that had diagrams of booby traps and pictures of dead people and all that other bad stuff. I was very interested because I knew my dad had been there and I wanted to learn more about it.
My dad was a helicopter pilot for the Navy. I remember that this was something we all thought was very cool growing up, and my dad was proud of being a pilot. He loved to fly. In Vietnam he picked up wounded people and dropped off SEAL teams on covert operations, people going in at night, stuff like that. He had Purple Hearts—I think three or four. He crashed a couple of times. He was never seriously wounded, though. He was very dismissive of his Purple Hearts. He didn't show them off or anything; he didn't wear them around. I just found them in a box one day.
He didn't really talk to me
about what happened to him, but there was one fantastic story—I say “fantastic” not in the positive sense—I remember hearing from my older brother, who my dad talked to more about the war because he was older. Anyway, one time, while he was flying in the middle of a firefight, the communications wire on my dad's helmet was cut by a bullet. The other guy could hear him, the next minute he couldn't. At the time, it sounded very exciting. When I was growing up, the way the war was talked about, or even not talked about… you internalize all that stuff. I don't think my dad, to this day, could bring himself to say that the war was a bad idea or that we were wrong to be there. No, I don't really know when I forged my own political ideas about it. There wasn't a whole lot of guidance from him.
I can sympathize, in some sense, with what it must have been like at the time, why we got involved. My dad's father fought in World War Two, and thus he grew up in a very patriotic household. He thought the United States could do no wrong. So when he volunteered he was just a kid who didn't understand what he was getting into. It's hard for me to point fingers about what part he must have played in the war. I'm not ready to do that.
A really weird thing happened a couple of years ago. I was visiting my grandparents, and they were giving away everything they had, and there was this little box of stuff my dad had sent them from Vietnam, and inside were some audiotapes he'd made while serving. I never knew these things existed, so I snatched them up and took them home. It was so bizarre. He recorded them at exactly the age that I was when I was listening to them. There he was sitting in this base and you could hear mortar shells, all these explosions, in the background. He had just come back from a mission, and I could hear the fatigue in his voice. He'd gone for two days without getting more than fifteen minutes of sleep. They were taking fire, and he was very blase about it. For the first time I thought about all the suffering he must have seen. He just sounded so tired. Not at all like the person I would know later, the guy who would endlessly justify the war. He was instead this exhausted guy who sounded so incredibly confused and weary, so completely unsure.
When my father turned eighteen, he got drafted. He had no choice. He was in the South, he was drafted. I think at that time my father had no idea about the war: one day, suddenly, he was holding a rifle. He was married during the war. His first daughter was born in 1967. In 1969, another daughter. Then another in 1972. He got very nervous. What if he died tomorrow with no son? He got a desk job in Saigon to avoid getting killed, so then they had me—that's all he's ever said to me about it.
I think my father doesn't tell me much about the war because of all the difficulty he had after. The Communists were very bad to him. When I was ten, he beat me because of the stress. He even beat my mom. But you should know that I think Ho Chi Minh was a great man. So does my father. It's very complicated.
Finally I think the war made our lives better. That's the biggest point. My father had a lot of GI friends, and he learned many things from them. He learned how important education was. Even the lowest-ranking American soldiers had gone to high school. Do you know he learned to read English because that was the only way he could read the canned food that came from America? He would want chicken, but he opened beef, or pork. So he had to learn how to read. He always dreamed of settling down in America, but he failed the exam at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. It was like the sky collapsed for my father. He had saved so much money for that.
He used to talk about things that were made in the U.S.A. That was enough for him: if it was made in the U.S.A., it was good. So I think he was very amazed by those soldiers who came here. They had nice food, good cigarettes, clean hair. They even waited in line for everything and never pushed. My father used to dream about America. He is still dreaming about going to America—but now he is so old.
I think when my dad heard he was going to Vietnam he bought into the whole thing about war: “It's exciting, it's different, it's valiant!” But he always told me that from the minute he got there the most important thing to him—aside from anything that we think was important now, like stopping Communism—was that his men didn't get hurt in any way. Even when it became clear that there was no sure reason why they were there, they still needed to get home, and it was his job to get them home.
Do I feel like less of a man because I didn't go through that? When I think I'm having a bad day, I realize that I've not had a bad day. There's not one single issue in my entire life that compares—and I've even had a gun pointed at me. (It was on a sales job. In Texas. A shotgun. Long story.) At some point I realized that I was alive because he had dealt with problems greater than I had ever dealt with or was going to deal with. I'll give you a quick story. After he had reconnected with his Marine buddies in the late 1980s, he had them all up to Connecticut, up to the house, and I think I was disagreeing with him about something while we were barbecuing—a “Will you go get the lemonade?” type of thing— and this guy B———, who was a New York City cop, pulled me aside and said, “Your father was a different man over there. Every single one of us has him to thank for being alive.” I was like fourteen. And I was arguing with him. About lemonade.
My dad's situation in Vietnam sucked, on an exponential level, but he was able to deal with it. So in a way Vietnam was the only thing I really knew about him. It was the only past he had. He had no youth other than the Vietnam War. When he had a story to tell, it tended to be about the guys, the situation from Vietnam. Those were all his stories. That was all he had.
Do you see this river? It separated my country for twenty years. Yes, we can walk to the other side. You asked about my family. First you must know that it was illegal for family members on different sides of this river to talk. My father went North and my uncles joined the ARVN, so you can see that in my family there were difficulties. In this province, Quang Tri province, there were many families with these difficulties. I think Quang Tri province suffered more than any other in Vietnam. Most of the Agent Orange victims are here. There were so many dead bodies around Quang Tri that tigers used to eat them. Brothers and sisters fought against each other in these fields every night. Sometimes they killed each other. I read a story about that once: one man discovers he has killed his older brother, and then he kills himself. Then their mother kills herself when she learns she has lost both of her sons. A terrible story. Well, it's a Quang Tri story. The man who wrote it is from Quang Tri.
One night, long after the war ended, my father and my uncles talked and learned that they all fought in the same battle in 1974. They may have shot at each other. No, I don't think they thought that was funny. I think it made them frightened and sad. It took them many years to become friends again—at least ten years. One of my uncles was reeducated, and for a long time he refused to talk about anything related to the war. My other uncle became a drunken man. They will all talk about it now only when they're drunk, and only when they're alone. That's why I decided to study history, to learn about both sides of my country. But it's very difficult to learn about the southern side. I've had to ask my friends in France and America to bring me books about that.
The only thing I can remember being said about the war when I was a kid was when we saw the fireworks at the Mall in Washington, D.C., on the Fourth of luly. My dad said there was a firework he liked because it reminded him of the sound of artillery. And once he told me that in Vietnam someone in his compound had a tame skunk as a pet. Literally those are the only things I remember him telling me when I was a kid. And this was in the 1980s, when all those movies started showing terribly traumatized vets. My dad wasn't at all like that. He was still an active-duty soldier at that point. My impression of him as a soldier was that he went to the office, carried a briefcase, occasionally traveled to Israel or Turkey, and brought me back stamps. Very different from my brothers. They know all about it.
It's not like it's a forbidden subject. It's just that I never had any curiosity about it when I was a kid, and I never thought to ask. I have to think this is because I'm a girl. M
y dad served two tours, both before I was born. First he was with the First Cav doing intelligence, usually enemy interrogation. The second tour was with MACV. Of course I think about the fact that my father may have done stuff that encroached upon the morally disturbing. I think about it a lot now. During all the Abu Ghraib stuff I thought, “Oh, yeah. My dad sort of knows something about that.” His take on it was that it signified a failure in the chain of command, basically. He said, “There are always going to be some sadists in there, and my job was to weed those people out.” He told my husband—not me—that one of his strategies when interrogating people was to take out a big knife and threaten prisoners with it. He said he had to come on very strong, right away, if he wanted information, because the people he was interrogating figured out pretty quickly that he wasn't going to use the knife. When my husband told me that, something clicked. The way he dealt with us growing up when we got in trouble was like: explosion! He'd just blow up, get totally furious, and then, as soon as he'd made his point, he'd calm down. So it's like those tactics carried over, which is kind of spooky. It was hard to reconcile that with the impression I'd always gotten—and this may be very naive—that to my dad Vietnam was this extended Boy Scout expedition. See, he's very upright. He's that kind of guy. He loves nature, rules, proper procedure.
He did once admit to me, though—and it's amazing what's coming back now that I'm talking to you—he did once admit, “We Americans did terrible things, and the Vietnamese did terrible things.” But no, Vietnam doesn't have much resonance to me—at all. Vietnam has not loomed over me. I don't feel like there's something I have to settle there. I don't know that much about it and don't feel any need to know much about it. But you know what? I wonder if it's because I didn't ask my dad about the war that I don't know anything, or because maybe there was a part of him that liked having this one person in his family who had no conception of him in that role.