by Tom Bissell
But I don't know. I don't know what all this is, or means. I need to figure out Vietnam for myself. Do I have any reaction to Americans whose fathers fought here? No. I told you I don't think about the war. It's abstract to me. It's not even an issue.
My dad didn't talk about it very much when I was growing up. I always knew he was a Marine and was proud of that—that's part of what made me want to be a Marine—but his experiences over there weren't shared with the family. He's part of the reason I'm here in Iraq, sure. Not all of it. I used to work at a gas station in high school, and the Marine recruiter regularly filled up his government vehicle there. I talked to him a lot, just as a friend. He never approached me about being a Marine. I talked to him one day as I was nearing the end of my high school education—and that was it. I entered the Marine Corps in 1990, as an enlisted aviation mechanic. For the next twelve years I worked through school, graduated from S———1——— University in 2002, applied for my commission, and here I am today, a lieutenant leading Marines.
No, my dad never got that far, and I'll tell you how I learned that. After I was already a Marine, I was stationed in Hawaii, my dad came and visited, and we were having dinner at a friend's house. The subject came up that my dad was a medically retired lance corporal. At the time I was a corporal myself, so everyone at the table got very curious, naturally. We all asked, “How did you become a medically retired lance corporal?” He looked right back at us and said, “I stepped on a land mine in Vietnam.” Then tears come to his eyes—which was hard, very hard, to see. Since coming to Iraq, I can sense a little bit of kinship there, between us, and maybe it will open up a little more when I get back.
I don't think I could compare the two wars at all. Or at least I haven't really analyzed what the comparison is. I don't have any ideas of what to think about there. But I can definitely relate to my dad's … well, there are some things that I would prefer not to talk about when I get back home. So I definitely can relate to him there. Maybe I can talk to him about it, and maybe that'll open up and he'll talk to me a little more about what brought him to tears that day when we were at my friend's house.
Now I talk to him pretty regularly. I've called him a couple of times at work. The first time I did it, my mom said that it made his day. I've done it several times now. Look, I know Vietnam was a profound event in American history. And sometimes we're called to do things that are not necessarily the most popular decision, the popular choice, but as Marines, as servants of our country, we're called to do those things and sometimes what we think about it doesn't matter.
I am nervous to talk to you. Not nervous. I am reserved. Because I have many things to say. I remember everything. And what I remember is terrible. We still have many problems here. I was born in 1968. For those Vietnamese born during that time … things happened to us, but it is not good to talk about it. I can give you background. Please do not record me. My father fought in the southern army. He was an important man. He was wounded in 1974. He never left his bed again. He died in 1976. Now I cannot get a job here in Saigon. I don't know if it's because of my father. Maybe. Maybe it's because I'm from the countryside. I speak English, but I can't get a job. And now I'm not so young. I work for the veterans sometimes, when they come. I love the veterans. I love to talk to them. The U.S. veterans. I have veteran friends in many states. They are such good guys. It's important they come back here.
I think I like them because they remind me of my father.
Acknowledgments
During the composition of this book, several people provided me with especial insight, aid, or encouragement. They are Heather Schroder, Dan Frank, Roger Hodge, Lewis Lapham, Allan Jenkins, Philip Caputo, Amber Hoover, Dixon Gaines, Margot Meyer, Fred Nicolaus, Ted Genoways, Matt Gross, Theodore Ross, and Markus Taussig.
Thank you to GQ's Devin Friedman, who first suggested I write about my father and Vietnam. Although GQ did not ultimately publish the piece, I am grateful to Devin, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Joel Lovell, all of whom helped me with multiple drafts.
Thank you to Doug Fix. My father and I traveled to Vietnam in November 2003, and a year later Doug and I retraced that trip. Doug was also a Vietnam veteran, my first writing teacher, and in all likelihood the reason I became a writer. Doug died while running a marathon on September 23, 2006. He is irreplaceable not only to me but to his wife, children, and grandchildren. His spirit and example have been a part of everything I have written, but his presence in these pages, however invisible, is especially profound. I would like to believe this book would have pleased him.
Thank you to Major Maria Pallotta, United States Marine Corps, without whom I could not have embedded with the Marines in Iraq in July 2005. This book is different, stranger, and, I hope, stronger because of that experience.
During my most recent trip to Vietnam in April 2005, made to cover the thirtieth anniversary of Saigon's fall for The Virginia Quarterly Review, I became part of a minor international incident when my traveling partners and fellow journalists Morgan Meis and Joe Pacheco were arrested and deported for interviewing a dissident artist without having first sought government permission. It was the first expulsion of foreign journalists to have occurred in Vietnam in more than five years, and the only thing that prevented me from sharing Morgan and Joe's fate was the fact that I had become sick and decided to stay at our hotel while they interviewed the artist. Which is to say that I would like very much to thank my Vietnamese friends, as well as my other friends who live in Vietnam or travel there regularly, but doing so could bring them unwanted attention. I would like these friends to know that this book could not have been written without their conversation, companionship, and generosity. I would also like to wish the men and women of Vietnam's intelligence apparatus continued happiness and independence, and to them offer my sincere and friendly hope that those so afflicted will one day be able to retrieve their heads from their asses.
Thank you to the staff of the Chancery Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, where the bulk of this book was written.
Thank you to the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland and the staff of Hawthornden Castle, where a draft of this book was completed.
Thank you to Jason Wilson and Jamaica Kincaid, who were kind enough to select a part of this book for Best American Travel Writing 2005.
Thank you to all who spoke to me about their fathers and the war.
Thank you to my brother, Johno, fellow traveler in Spaceship Bissell, who sometimes has trouble understanding my compulsion to disclose highly personal family information in the pages of national magazines but who accepts this compulsion with what eventually becomes exasperated grace. Thank you to my mother, Alexandria Thomas, and my stepmother, Carolyn Bissell, for understanding why I needed to write this and supporting me throughout. Thank you to Donald Brandt, my stepfather: I hope you knew that I always considered myself lucky to have two such extraordinary fathers. I miss you. I love you.
Thank you, finally, to Nathalie Chicha, who has my love, shares my life, and for and alongside whom I write.
Bibliography
(Occasionally Fortified with Thoughts Toward Recommended Reading)
Addington, Larry H. Americans War in Vietnam: A Short Narrative History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Among the best short histories of the war available.
Adler, Bill. Letters from Vietnam. New York: Ballantine, 2003.
Anderegg, Michael, ed. Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
Anderson, Kent. Sympathy for the Devil. New York: Bantam, 1999. (Reprint of the 1987 edition.) A curiously underknown and terrifyingly convincing novel of the war.
Anton, Frank, with Tommy Denton. Why Didn't You Get Me Out?: A POWs Nightmare in Vietnam. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. (Reprint of the 1997 edition.)
Appy, Christian G. Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides. New York: Viking, 2003. Possibly the best book about the war to be publ
ished in more than a decade, and without question its finest oral history.
Baker, Mark. Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. (Reprint of the 1981 edition.)
Bao Ninh. The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam. Translated by Phan Thanh Hao. New York: Riverhead, 1996. (Reprint of the 1995 edition.)
Bilton, Michael, and Kevin Sim. Four Hours in My Lai. New York: Penguin, 1993. (Reprint of the 1992 edition.)
Bizot, François. The Gate. Translated by Euan Cameron. London: Harvill Press, 2003.
Borton, Lady. Ho Chi Minh: A Portrait. Hanoi: Youth Publishing House, 2003. A beautifully designed and interesting book that nevertheless soft-pedals on every single controversial fact regarding Ho's life and politics.
Broyles, William, Jr. Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to Peace. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
Bui Tin. From Enemy to Friend: A North Vietnamese Perspective on the War. Translated by Nguyen Ngoc Bich. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002.
Burkett, B. G., and Glenna Whitley. Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History. Dallas: Verity Press, 1998.
Butler, David. The Fall of Saigon: Scenes from the Sudden End of a Long War. New York: Dell, 1986. (Reprint of the 1985 edition.) A book it is hard not to ingest in one emotionally paralyzed sitting. Butler has the humility to include letters written to his wife in the last month of Saigon's siege in which he assures her that the city will not fall. As is obvious from the text, a major source for the first part of this book.
Caputo, Philip. Means of Escape: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
———. A Rumor of War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977.
Chandler, David P. Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999.
Chomsky, Noam. At War with Asia. Oakland: AK Press, 2005. (Reprint of the 1970 edition.) My second favorite passage: “Others regard ‘Khmer socialism’ as being a step toward an egalitarian and modern society, within the specific context of Cambodian history and culture. I do not have enough information to attempt a judgment.” My favorite passage: “My personal guess is that, unhindered by imperialist intervention, the Vietnamese would develop a modern industrial society with much popular participation in implementation and direct democracy at the lower level of organization, a highly egalitarian society with excellent conditions of welfare and technical education.” The passage with which it is impossible to take issue: “Perhaps someday they [U.S. war planners] will acknowledge their ‘honest errors’ in their memoirs, speaking of the burdens of world leadership and the tragic irony of history. Their victims, the peasants of Indochina, will write no memoirs and will be forgotten. They will join the countless millions of earlier victims of tyrants and oppressors.”
Clark, Johnnie. Guns Up!, rev. ed. New York: Presidio Press, 2002.
Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. An amazing and deeply sobering history, the reading of which should be the duty of every American.
Dallek, Robert. Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960-1973. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
———. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. New York: Little, Brown, 2003.
Dang Nghiem Van, Chu Thai Son, and Luu Hung. Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam. Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2000.
Downs, Frederick. The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. (Reprint of the 1978 edition.) One is hesitant to criticize Mr. Downs (he lost his right arm during combat), but sentences such as “Never again would I trust any dinks” and “It turned out most of us liked to kill other men. Some of the guys would shoot at a dink much as they would at a target” make it very, very hard to sympathize with him.
Duiker, William J. The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, 2nd ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996.
———. Historical Dictionary of Vietnam, 2nd ed. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998.
———. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Although I was not aware of it at the time of my first journey, this book, despite being dedicated to “the Vietnamese People,” is banned in Vietnam because of the information on pages 199 and 200, which concern Ho's probable wife, Nguyen Thi Minh Khai; her lover; and Ho's possible role, glancingly treated by Duiker, in their arrest and execution by the French.
Duong Thu Huong. Novel Without a Name. Translated by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. (Reprint of the 1995 edition.) Written by a woman who led a PAVN Communist Youth Brigade of forty volunteers to South Vietnam. She was one of her brigade's three survivors. Almost all of Huong's work has been banned by the Vietnamese government.
Elliott, David W. P. The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975, 2 vols. Armonk, N.Y: M. E. Sharpe, 2003. Written by a U.S. Army veteran of the war who later worked for the Rand Corporation in Vietnam, this two-volume monster is, at 1,547 small-print pages, quite possibly the most elaborate examination of the war's development and consequences. Despite its zeroed-in focus on only one area of Vietnam, it is also tremendously enthralling. Highly recommended to any reader looking to understand how the war affected average Vietnamese and incomparable for its evenhandedness and emotional sobriety.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Penguin, 2003. (Reprint of the 2002 edition.) Better written and more entertaining than it has any right to be. Here is Ellsberg's take on The Pentagon Papers themselves: “[I]t was not any individual page or revelation, or even a small set of them, that was very important. It was the overall detailed documentation of our involvement over the years and the repetitive patterns of internal pessimism and desperate escalation and deception of the public in the face of what was, realistically, hopeless stalemate. It was the total lack of a good reason for what we were doing anywhere in the whole story.” Strangely, Ellsberg broke no existing law in leaking the Papers to The New York Times, but as his lawyer explained to him, “Well, let's face it, Dan. Copying seven thousand pages of top secret documents and giving them to The New York Times has a bad ring to it.”
Engelmann, Larry. Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. A splendidly discordant oral history, made all the more so by the many revealing inconsistencies within its shared memories. A major source for part one of this book.
Fall, Bernard. Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2002. (Reprint of the 1966 edition.)
———. Last Reflections on a War. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2000.
———. Street Without Joy. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1994. (Reprint of the 1964 edition.)
Fenton, James. All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988. Contains one of my favorite accounts of the fall of Saigon: Mr. Fenton, a poet and Englishman, personally looted the U.S. Embassy. And this: “I went as a supporter of the Viet-cong, wanting to see them win. I saw them win. What feeling did that leave me with, and where does it leave me now? I know that by the end of my stay in Saigon I had grown to loathe the apparatchiks who were arriving every day with their cardboard suitcases from Hanoi. I know that I loathed their institutional lies and their mockery of political justice. But as the banners went up in honor of Lenin, Marx, and Stalin, I know too that I had known this was coming. Had we not supported the NLF ‘without illusions’? Must I not accept that the disappearances, the gagging of the press, the political distortion of reality was all part of a classical Stalinism which nevertheless ‘had its progressive features’?… We had been seduced by Ho. My
political associates in England were not the kind of people who denied that Stalinism existed. We not only knew about it, we were very interested in it. We also opposed it. Why then did we also support it? Or did we?”
FitzGerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. New York: Back Bay Books, 2002. (Reprint of the 1972 edition.)
Gaiduk, Ilya V. The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996.
Gannon, Kathy I Is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan. New York: PublicAffairs, 2005.
Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. New York: Penguin, 1977. (Reprint of the 1955 edition.)
Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York: Little, Brown, 1996. (Reprint of the 1995 edition.)
Guillon, Emmanuel. Cham Art: Treasures from the Da Nang Museum, Vietnam. Bangkok: River Books, 2001.
Halberstam, David. Ho. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.
Hammes. T.X. The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century. Saint Paul, Minn.: Zenith Press, 2004.
Harrison, James P. The Endless War: Vietnam's Struggle for Independence. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.