by Tom Bissell
We weren't lucky. My father was drafted into ARVN and told me he never saw a Communist until the tanks came into Saigon. He tried to get out, but he wasn't lucky. Maybe we could have gotten out, but my mother didn't want to go. So we stayed. It's not that unusual. Why do you want to talk to me? I have nothing to say. We were just unlucky.
My father was reeducated for one year. After, he never talked about the war. He also never worked again, not a real job. My parents were very poor after the war. They still are, and I have to help them. That's why I do this work. No, they know what I do. It makes them very unhappy. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes the men are kind.
For me, what I think—what I think is that the war was like a thing that happened to us, do you know? Like an animal that attacked, or a storm. It took my family and pushed it in another direction and made it different. Everyone in my family has always been very sad. But nothing terrible happened to us, not really. We're not special. The worst my father was ever hurt was when a jeep ran over his foot. And yet the war changed everything for him, and us. I think that is so strange to think about.
As far back as I can remember, the war was who my dad was. He was in the Army. I think he was an infantryman. First Cavalry. I think. I don't really know any specifics because he won't talk much about it. Well, he would tell stories. And I always wanted to know, because as his daughter I was obsessed with this aspect of who he was. I was also obsessed with war movies—any war movie. Totally obsessed. In sixth grade we all had to do reports on something: space, Columbus, George Washington. I did mine on Vietnam.
The stories he would tell me were always very innocuous human interest stories. Like how when he was eating in the field the flies were so big and so numerous that he always had to brush them off his food or how the Vietnamese cut up snakes and ate them. As for the details of what he did, all I had to work off were the newspaper articles. They told the story about how he got the Silver Star. Yeah, he got the Silver Star. He and his buddies were in a situation in which they were overrun and his commanding officer was shot down while running up a hill toward the enemy. When the commanding officer went down, everyone started retreating. But my dad didn't, even though he had the radio on his back, which made him a target. He went back, by himself, and took out multiple foxholes filled with Vietnamese and went up and grabbed his CO. and dragged him back down. The guy died, eventually, but my dad tried to save him and while doing that single-handedly killed a bunch of people. The other newspaper story described how he was injured. He was actually pretty seriously injured. He was shot between the eyes, but the bullet exploded as it made contact with his face. Obviously if it hadn't he wouldn't be here and I wouldn't be here. His face was just blown apart. His nose today is plastic. His whole face was reconstructed. Anyway, after he got shot in the face, a medic bandaged up his head and put him in a helicopter. That helicopter got shot down. So he was on the ground next to a guy who'd been shot in the spine or something and couldn't move. But he could see and speak. My father could move and hear but he couldn't speak or see. So he was holding a gun and the other guy was sprawled next to him—they were all alone at this point; the pilots were dead—and the other guy started giving my dad the time on the clock. “Nine o'clock fire! Eleven o'clock fire!” And the two of them stayed together that way and managed to hang in there until someone came for them.
I have these monumental stories of what he did. It's hard for me to reconcile the man he is today with these superhuman stories. I wish I knew the man in those stories. We don't have a relationship now. We're estranged. I told him I couldn't speak to him anymore. He's just got too much hostility and aggression. No one in his life is ever good enough. He's really fucked up. He blames it all on the war and says he has post-traumatic stress syndrome. Personally, I have a hard time understanding this. He was a much different person ten years ago, fifteen years ago. I don't know why there would be such a delayed reaction to what he experienced. But maybe that's the way war is. He's been such a huge influence on my life. He was the parent I was closest to when I was young. He's the one who's been the best to me and the worst to me, out of anyone in my life. I've always believed that if I can somehow understand who he was then—that wonderful and brave and shiny young man—and figure out what's different now, and how those two people connect … God, I don't know. I just want to know that person so badly.
I was born in Hanoi on the first night of the Christmas bombings in 1972, and my dad was a very traditional Communist. In the war he was a communications soldier, not a frontline soldier. He doesn't talk about the war with me, but he's the kind of person who would have done what the others did. I don't know if he really wanted to fight. He still thinks that Americans are very dangerous. He thinks we must be really careful around people like you. When I had a job with an NGO, he asked me, “Where is the headquarters?” I said, “New York.” He said, “I don't want you to work for them. If you work with them, you must be really careful.”
I can understand his feelings. We were so poor after the war. When I was a girl in Nam Dinh—that's a very Communist province and one of the poorest—the conditions were terrible. We had a one-room apartment in a dormitory. No bathrooms, no kitchen, just one room. We had to share restrooms with two dozen other families, and there was rationed water and meat. I don't know how much we earned every month, but like everyone we usually ate noodles and rice powder. And my father was a Party member!
My feelings about the war? What I really think is that the war was about two small groups. The group here in Vietnam is the people who called themselves Communists. They raised that flag and told the people, “Go, go—fight for freedom!” But what is freedom? I think “freedom” is just for their benefit. A lot of my friends are teachers, and now their students are asking them, “Why didn't we just let the Americans own the country? Why did we have to fight? After ten or twenty years, they would have had to give us everything back, and we'd have such better conditions!” So I don't like the war. I don't like the way many people here—in my opinion—take the war and say it was for everyone when it was just for some people.
Does my father know about all the Communist abuses? Sure, he knows. One day I brought home a banned book, and I showed it to him. I asked him if he wanted to read it. He read some pages and gave it back to me and told me, “I know. I know all of this. There's nothing new in this. Everyone knows. And no one cares. I don't care. You shouldn't read this—it's too dangerous.” If you lived in the North and you didn't want to be a Communist and you didn't follow the Party, then what did you do? If you wanted to survive, then you needed your monthly Party ticket. Tickets for meat, for milk, for bicycle tires. Everything was in the Party's control. If you didn't go with them you had nothing. So you had no choice. There was no thinking. And they controlled the war. They still control it.
I have this very old friend in Hanoi. He's eighty now, and he has red blood, just like my father. He's red. Totally red. I asked him once about the Party, the war, and everything that happened afterwards, and he said, “From the bottom of my heart, we didn't want to do any bad things. We tried to be good. But it all became such a mess.”
That's my father right there. No, I've been here before. The first time I was here was right after it was dedicated. I guess I was twenty-one or twenty-two. If you recall, there was a lot of debate about whether or not this was a fitting or suitable memorial to the men who died. The stark-ness of it freaked a lot of people out. I mean, look around here. Statues, huge towers, domes: that's heroism, that's sacrifice. This is just a big scary wall with a bunch of names written on it. That it was designed by an Asian woman did not, I suspect, help matters. Yeah, I think I was a little troubled by it the first time I saw it. Now I can't imagine any better monument. I mean, look at it. It's just beautiful. It's perfect. It's probably the best memorial in the country, in my opinion.
I think about what my father would have thought about it sometimes. I was ten when he died, so I can't really say I have much of a sense of him
beyond what my mom has told me or the letters he wrote me. Since he was writing those letters to a little boy, I don't know what his politics were or what he truly felt about the war. My mom's pretty liberal—she actually spoke out against the war after he died, and I think he probably would have not objected to that. I don't know. When someone you love dies, so much of your memory of him becomes really wishful. I try to avoid thinking about his true feelings, actually. Sure, I still have all those letters, but I haven't read them in years. It's not painful anymore, no. It all feels like it was a long time ago.
But growing up without a father was definitely hard, and even today there are things that I experience that produce this strange impulse to call him and tell him about it. I can't explain that impulse. God, I even remember looking for him in the bleachers when I graduated from high school. Maybe a child is hardwired that way, or somehow psychologically determined to have parents. If he'd lived, he'd probably still be alive today. So that's kind of bittersweet.
How did he die? Of friendly fire, in an accident. He was hit by artillery. Seven other men died with him. I've become pretty close with the kids of some of those other guys. We send one another Christmas cards, birthday cards. You try—I try—to avoid thinking about the war, any war, in terms of the sheer human waste they create, but look at all these names. My dad's just one name, one tiny name on this wall. And looking at it at this moment all I can think is “What a fucking waste.”
I always say to foreigners that my father was not VC. “Not VC! No, not VC! He was a good man. He was in the southern Army.” The truth is that he was VC. My mother hardly saw him for five years. One day the VC came in and took him. After that we heard very little from him. Sometimes we saw him but never for long. The VC took many men from our village. Some of them didn't want to go with them, some of them did. My father did. He was religious, and I think he believed it was his fate to fight. I had a father, but I don't know my father. I never knew my father. Do you know what I mean? He died five years ago, and I wasn't that sad. Who was my father? He was just a man who lived in our house.
My mother always said to me he was not the same when he came back. I was one when he left, seven when we reunified. My mother told me that sometimes when she woke up he would be sitting on the edge of the bed, holding his head in his hands, crying. We lived in the countryside, and at night it was quite loud. He couldn't sleep because of the noise of the countryside—the grass, the river, the insects. It reminded him of too many bad memories. But he never talked about it. He never really talked about anything. I don't know why. Maybe no one really talked about it because that generation all suffered so much. But I think my father saw and did awful things. The war took too many fathers and made them strangers to their families.
My father dodged the draft and fled to Canada. My mother went with him, and I wound up being born in Montreal. Eventually he came back, was prosecuted, defended himself—and won. That decision became the basis of President Carter's pardon for everyone who dodged the draft. I think the Vietnam War really drove my father's generation crazy, in a way. My dad, when he was a kid, had his “I Like Ike” buttons, so he grew up with one image of America and then had that image crash against the whole experience of the Vietnam War. He didn't go and bomb things or anything like that—he became a totally different kind of radical— but he essentially came to believe that the society he grew up in is a complete lie.
As a little boy, at the playground, I'd hear kids say, “My father is a lawyer” or “My father is a fireman” or “My father owns a store,” and I would say, “My father is an American traitor!” As if that were the most honorable thing you could be. I remember these times when I'd sit with my mother, looking through our family scrapbook. See, when his case was up, there was a television documentary made about him and Time and Newsweek did stories, so we had this huge scrapbook. My mom would say, “Now, here's your daddy being taken off to jail.” This was our family heirloom. But she was proud of it, and my father was proud of it. And I'm proud of it. I think he did the right thing. But I also can't have conversations with him when it comes to international issues or foreign policy without being pulled inexorably back into the orbit of Vietnam. Everything is looked at through that lens. I guess what I'm saying is that I was so indoctrinated into my family's way of looking at the war that only later did I ever even come across the idea that there was any meaningful debate about it.
For too long Vietnam didn't mean anything to me. Vietnam for me was a symbol, a code word, the thing that had thrown our family into the footnotes of history. In a way I criticize my father a little bit for that. As much as he didn't want to be a part of the war, and as much as he felt that what was happening to the Vietnamese was immoral, he didn't want to deal with Vietnam too much. He never learned that much about the history, the politics. I know vastly more about Vietnamese history and politics than he does. All he knows is that it was bad and he didn't want any part of it. Now that I've been to Vietnam, I realize everything is so complicated. The last time I was there I met Nguyen Cao Ky, and I found myself having a lot of sympathy for him and what he was trying to do as a Vietnamese patriot. I think Ky was deeply wrong and misguided about many things, but once you really wrestle with the war, solid notions of right and wrong seem incapable of capturing it.
Understand that I make clear political and moral distinctions. I still think it was wrong, but I have come to believe that maybe my dad recognized that in order to maintain the consistency of his opinions it was better not to know too much about Vietnam. So many people, once the war was over, once the choppers left Saigon, thought it was all done with. They do not know what happened to Vietnam after, and they don't care. I mean, they care. My father cares. But he doesn't care enough to know. I think caring enough to know makes it difficult to have the absolute moral high ground. Even Neil Sheehan. A Bright Shining Lie is a great book; it really does illustrate the weird American delusions that drove our foreign policy, but in his next book, which is about going back to Vietnam years later, you really begin to see the failure of the 1960s generation in dealing with this next step. They can only blame the way Vietnam is fucked up on the lingering aftereffects of the war, as if there is no agency among the Vietnamese themselves.
At a certain point I think my father's generation put the Vietnamese into the role of pure victim in such a way that it became intellectually stifling. So as a member of a very different generation, going to Vietnam was personally important. I felt like I was completing a project. I felt some need to both live up to the ideals of my father and the pathos of his generation and at the same time overcome those ideals and that pathos.
I never really pushed my parents on it. It was their version of the war, and I accepted it. You know, that the South would have won if the Americans hadn't pulled out. I should have asked them more about it. There's a lot that I probably should talk to my parents about, but I still haven't. How do they feel about my living in Vietnam today? I don't think they can accept what Vietnam is now. They can't accept that anything good can happen here. Vietnam has to be bad. When I was growing up, the whole Vietnamese thing was just kind of there. I didn't have Vietnamese friends. I liked Vietnamese food, but that was about it. My parents thought we were racist against Vietnamese! But my mom told me before I came over, “Don't trust anyone with a northern accent.” Which is unbelievable.
What does the war mean? For me, the war is what made me into a Vietnamese person brought up with Vietnamese values in a culture with American values. But no, there's no war inside me. I don't think so, at least. When I came back, it felt like the right thing to do at the time. The third day I was back here, everything felt good. Two years later, I'm still here. That said, I usually don't tell people, unless they seem like they're honestly asking, that I grew up in the States. You get such a huge range of reactions. I usually tell people I'm Korean. But I was very lucky to get out. We got out the last day. But I have no memories of that. I was eleven months old. That was the defining mome
nt of my life, but I don't even know what happened.
My dad was a doctor, a ranger. He wasn't the guy fighting; he was patching other people up. But he was always proud to be a ranger. Beyond his pride, I never heard much about what my dad did. Once—I had just turned twenty-one—a bunch of my dad's friends from his ranger days got together in Houston in a very Vietnamese restaurant. They were all talking, and I suddenly saw my dad drinking beer the way you see Vietnamese men drink all the time here, and for the first time I heard stories of how my dad was running around the battlefield, being covered by these drinking buddies, while he saved people's lives. You need to realize that these weren't guys my dad hung out with typically. Most of his friends were doctors. These were different men. It was weird. But no, I don't have any lingering anger for the Communists. I think they're fucked up for reasons that are beyond ideology. It's just incompetence and no different from any other place where a small group has power and wants to serve its own self-interest. This is not my personal resentment, understand—it's an extension of my father's resentment. But it's not something I walk around Saigon thinking about.
The really fucked-up thing is that my dad's older brother was an officer in the North Vietnamese Army, and he has a son in Saigon. I know them. I met them the first time I came back. My uncle had passed away right before. This is all so messed up. My dad had two older brothers who died fighting the French and a sister who died fighting the French. She was one of those girls pushing a fruit cart around launching grenades out of it. So my family came out of that very rare ARVN few who fought the French. Anyway, my father and uncle never reconciled. I barely even knew he existed until right before he died. And then all I ever heard was how evil my uncle was. When I came back, my uncle had just passed away and my aunt and cousin were sitting there talking to me, and it turned out that my uncle had written a letter to us—I never saw the letter—but it was very apologetic, saying this never should have happened, it should have never divided our family like this, and when the letter came around to my father he refused to read it. Keep in mind, my uncle was dead. My dad still refused. My uncle protected everyone on my mom's side that was still here, even though he wasn't related to them by blood. Without my uncle, so many in my mom's family would have gone through hell. My uncle was a good officer, and really cared about my mom's family—a really fine man, it turns out. I would never hear this from my father. It all came out later.