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CONFRONTING THE GHOST: VISITING A FATHER'S VIETNAM 
Why another book about Vietnam? This is the question Tom Bissell anticipates in the Author's Note to his new book The Father of All Things. What could possibly add to the litany of books (over 30,000) and movies about this chapter in American history? Haven't the Tobias Wolffs and Tim O'Briens covered every aspect of the GI experience? Haven't we seen enough Tom Cruises in wheelchairs and Martin Sheens screaming about napalm to render clichéd the story of the young American losing his innocence and idealism to the horrors of war? More specifically, what could Bissell, born two years after U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, add to the already bursting canon? "There is nothing 'new' in this book" he answers, ". . . [it] contains . . . an emotional experience interwoven with established historical facts of the Vietnam War—an experience that I hope is and feels new." I answer that the word "interwoven" may be what's unique: The Father of All Things is at once a beautifully lyrical travel narrative, memoir, history, and political critique. Beyond that, Bissell has created an inimitable book ambitious and extensive in scope, a scope not bogged down by its own broadness, one grand in subject and line-by-line precision. A stunning book, it is a new way to look at and read the war. Part I of the three-part work is an amalgamation of fictions about his father, Captain John Bissell in the year 1975, almost ten years after the ex-Marine returned from Vietnam; historical accounts of the fall of Saigon; and Bissell's own ruminations on his family history. Part II, which comprises the bulk of the book, is a travelogue of the author's visit with his father to Vietnam in 2005, a journey undertaken so a son can begin the process of understanding his father. The narrative of the trip is set against the facts of the war; Bissell actually divides Part II into five subsections, each titled with a historical or political question he examines and analyzes. Part III is brief; it contextualizes the author's experience as the child of a soldier by including short oral histories from children of both American and Vietnamese veterans. |
| "Bissell's love of history is equaled only by his passion for language and vivid prose." |
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The overarching goal of Bissell's project seems to be tallying the cost of the Vietnam War not for the generation that lived through it, but for that generation's children or those born in the war's aftermath. And through his examination of the war's legacy, Bissell explores the myth of our parents, the lore we, as children, create around them, and the truth we begin to understand about them as we reach adulthood. He writes, "Chances were, the war happened pre-you . . . before you recognized the reality of yourself . . . had nothing to do with the reality of your father. This strange, lost war...forced us to confront the past before we had any idea of what the past really was." His father talked to him about the war all through Bissell's childhood, but the stories felt fabled and distant. Remote, too, felt Philip Caputo's description of his father in Caputo's famed war memoir when the senior Bissell is remembered as the one who made everyone laugh. Bissell struggles to reconcile the man his father must have been before the war (the one with "the average sadnesses") with the man who raised him; the trip to Vietnam becomes the backdrop and catalyst for this reconciliation.
The author's decision to start the book in 1975 invites readers to equate the Bissells: the father would have been the same age as his son is now. We see the ex-Marine in a series of fictional and dreamlike scenes written with notable creative license, but which were also based on letters, photographs, and a question Bissell posed to his father about his life then. (Answer: "I was a young guy, working hard. Always pissed off.") The agreed-upon facts of 1975 seem to be this: Captain John Bissell was in the midst of a decaying marriage (he and his wife divorced two years later), and he spent his nights drinking and watching the same war movies over and over. Bissell's fictionalization of this time period feels contrived. Here Captain John Bissell is shown thinking everything feels "cold and dead;" he's shown tossing and turning at in bed, remembering night patrols and the "buttery smell of a cleaned M14." Then he's shown needing a drink, imagining "scotch-soaked slivers of ice" melting on his teeth and longing for his wife while thinking, "Fuck her. She does not know." I could perhaps accept these sentiments in memoir form from Bissell's father, but when his son attempts it, I feel like I'm reading a composite of every Vietnam book ever written, a veritable collage of clichés—beautifully written, haunting and lyrical clichés, but clichés all the same. That these ethereal scenes depicting his father's slow emotional collapse are set against the fall of Saigon prompts Bissell to again anticipate our initial perceptions: "The unthinkably disastrous occurred and I—we all—live in the paradoxical normalcy of aftermath . . . I do not intend to equate the destruction of my parents' marriage with the collapse of South Vietnam, yet in my mind they are endlessly connected . . . " Because of the clichés of Part I, I suspected Bissell would do the obvious throughout; he would conflate the two stories—the one of the war in Asia and the war in the Bissell's home—into a symmetrical, neatly wrapped allegory. But by the book's end, I was pleasantly surprised to find he's too smart a writer for that—he's done far too much research, both on the war and his father's psyche, to serve the tidy conclusions that a lesser author might have offered. His research comes at the war from many angles—political, financial, emotional, American and Vietnamese (they call it the American War)—which safeguards his book from the personal. In Part I, I was turned off by the sheer abundance of historical information and Bissell's eagerness to make sure readers walk away with all the intricacies. I'm someone who learned about the Vietnam War from Platoon and Deer Hunter, where the Vietnamese were called Charlie (or worse), not the People's Liberation Armed Forces. In short, I didn't have the background to jump headlong into dense historical accounts and analysis. The bombardment of three-word names and three-letter acronyms within just the first fifteen pages of the book read like the Dramatis Personae for a play I hadn't yet seen: a long list of meaningless names not yet developed into the characters I would come to recognize and remember. And yet Bissell's passion for history, which bordered on fanaticism, moved from dense and impenetrable to somewhat charming. He has a child's enthusiasm for wacky tidbits; these found themselves quarantined in parenthetical asides set off from the more sober and academic discourse. I grew excited at the sight of curved brackets, inside which a piece of trivia—like long mole hair being considered a sign of good luck in Vietnam—would wink at me. Other fun minutiae: Ho Chih Minh would leave a cheeky itinerary of his daily activities for his pursuers; in the early 2000s, the Vietnamese government funded a billion dong program to increase the average height of its people; one Vietnamese political group after World War II was a scurvy gang of river pirates. I would love an entire book from Bissell on river pirates alone. But for all the fascinating details, sometimes it was too much for one text to bear. I didn't sit down with a juicy little pork chop of information; an entire succulent roast of research was placed in front of me. Anxiety over all I had to consume left me at first unable to enjoy the finer flavors of each point. But gradually and grudgingly, I realized that a pork chop doesn't offer complete understanding of pig; to achieve true knowledge of pork, one must have the whole hog. But I belabor the point. Let me say it more plainly: This is not a book to read just once. Nowhere is the cornucopia of information more evident than in the bibliography. (It is also where we admire Bissell's fairness as a judge of history; his consideration of all sides of this controversial war is laudable.) And though he writes, "Encyclopediasm was not my goal in writing this book," his ten-page bibliography of books about Vietnam contradicts this statement many times over. He includes everything. From books on Vietnam's prerecorded oral history, to Michael Herr's Dispatches and a female Vietnamese soldier's memoir (still banned in her country), to David Elliot's two-volume, 1,547-page examination of the war's development and consequences—it's all there. The bibliography is an enjoyable read in and of itself; Bissell provides mini-reviews on much of the extensive catalog. Bissell describes Keith Taylor's book "as dry as rice powder, but an immensely helpful study of pre-colonial (even-prerecorded-history) Vietnam." Of Frederick Downs' memoir: "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 . . .' make it very, very hard to sympathize with him." Of Walton's The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat: "Did I mention this book is nuts?" Of Tobias Wolff's memoir: "so finely written to be almost cruel." After piquing my unwilling interest, Bissell helpfully differentiates the must-reads from, say, Kissinger's memoir ("a thoroughly evasive book from a thoroughly disgusting statesman"). In Part II, Bissell hit his stride. I was completely and utterly drawn in; I read in stop-and-go traffic, underlining whole pages of narrative. He attempts to answer five big questions: Was Ho Chih Minh a Stalinist? Why were the leaders of South Vietnam so corrupt and incompetent? Why did officials at all levels of the U.S. military and government lie so often and so publicly about the war? Could the U.S. have won the war in Vietnam? My growing familiarity with the names and acronyms helped me to truly appreciate Bissell's incisive historical and political analyses, as well as the amazing clarity with which he conveyed the intricacies and ambiguity inherent in those subjects. This book does not definitively answer those questions about the war, and to do so would be a gross over-simplification of history. Bissell instead provides a thorough examination of the numerous and often contradictory insights into the war. The lack of clear answers left me thoughtful, not frustrated; it seemed like the only way to write intelligently and fairly about war. More than that, however, Bissell seamlessly braided threads of history and political analysis with the backbone of the narrative, a father-and-son journey to the father's former battlefields. It is a masterful merging of travelogue and memoir. He, his father, their two Vietnamese guides, a tape recorder, and a country that holds different meanings for each person become players in a powerful, poignant, and ultimately ambivalent story. Whereas Part I felt forced, the vibrant backdrop of Vietnam and the chemistry between son and father in this section of the book propel the story along on its own volition. Tom Bissell is the consummate writer and historian—loquacious, passionate, and able to assign meaning to a journey familial and historical in scope. Bissell senior is his foil—laconic, sage, and wise. He takes Vietnam in without a writer's need to compress every observation and emotion into words that may or may not do them justice. His son brings the research and scholarly insight into the war, and while the father may not have the advantage of eloquent expression and grandiose ideas, he lived through the history that his son has only studied. Captain John Bissell was there. It's what fascinates Bissell: Vietnam as unknown grandmother, as the source of the father he grew up with. Visiting Vietnam provided a chance to commune with the ghost. In one scene, war-maimed beggars confront Bissell and his father while they eat in a Vietnamese café. His father tells Bissell they should give them money, which astounds Bissell. To his mind, his father has always held a "fierce antipathy for those who did not work hard—street people, Europeans, his Communist son . . ." The Communist son is, of course, Bissell, who, to his father's dismay, is soft "with beggars...a hopeless enabler." A "legless, crab-like man wearing a flip-flop sandal on each hand" approaches Bissell's father, who looks upon him with an expression, "simply unprecedented." Bissell responds, "One would think that after three decades I would have seen all his possible permutations of facial expression. But this one was new . . . It was a face looking deeply into that of another human being and seeing no possibility but mercy." Moments like these ground the narrative in a reality more devastating and contradictory than any fiction could be. Bissell also questions the stories he remembers from his childhood, dispels them, and then reconfigures the lore as an adult. As a child, he remembers being told over and over that a black Marine saved his father from near death. So ingrained was the tale that Bissell had always assumed it explained his father's lack of racism in the less than tolerant rural Midwest. But at site of the supposed heroism, his father says that it wasn't a black Marine who saved him; the story was entirely Bissell's creation: In the emergency of growing up, we all need heroes. The father I grew up with was no hero . . . too wounded . . . sad . . . Too funny, too explosive, too confusing. Heroes are simple. This makes them do that. The active heroism of my imaginary black Marine made a passive hero of my father.Parents are people, complicated and not always the hero/protector children want them to be. Stories are created—or maybe not created, but remembered. We think, That was the year Mom was sick a lot, the birthday gift Dad sent was lost in the mail. But as adults, we discern the truth: Mom was hung over, Dad never mailed the gift. Or perhaps, as with Bissell's black Marine, we prefer to stay within our recollections. If so, Bissell seems to argue that the canon of Vietnam War literature and film fulfills the adult need to transform disaster into a recognizable narrative of cohesion and heroism. Bissell's narrative style reflects his generation. It's a sprawling, multi-faceted narrative reliant on stylistic devices common to post-Vietnam literature: a series of cinematic jump cuts, subject to subject to subject. It is Eggers-ian without that writer's snarky self-aware preciousness. It is the Discovery Channel of books: entertaining, sensual, and graphically stimulating, but fundamentally informative and educational. In one page alone, Bissell moves from a conversation with his father about splashing onto the shores of Da Nang with no real understanding of Vietnamese culture to the bitterness his father feels about being sent to a foreign country with no training from the military about that country's culture. The narrative then pans out to a description of the brick patio where Bissell and his father are having their conversation. This leads to Chinese architectural clichés in Vietnam's built environment, and then a meditation on China as a long-standing military threat to Vietnam, sparking in turn a knowledgeable dissertation on the Vietnamese guerilla culture that resulted from the threat of Chinese attack. And yet Bissell's literary A.D.D. is deceptive, belying the fact that he is in complete control of a rambling narrative. The convolution is intentional, mimicking the intricacies and loose ends of the war itself. Bissell operates that digressive and meandering style without confusing the reader because he seems to know about everything and how to write about everything in every form, even fiction. (I forgive Bissell for the tedious Part I only because it is beautifully written.) He's a damn good writer—poetic, witty, erudite, thoughtful, thought-provoking, and every other clichéd adjective used to describe someone who makes you realize what a lazy and less talented writer you are. As one reviewer has said of Bissell and his work, "he is a Hemingway who may have watched a lot of Seinfeld," but whatever the comparisons, The Father of All Things reflects Bissell's impressive range. It establishes him as a "generalist," a literary jack-of-all-trades that Bissell describes in one interview as his writing ambition. After this book, no one can call him a dilettante. Bissell's love of history is equaled only by his apparent passion for language and vivid prose. Take his description of a moat: "Resting upon its water was an inch of pond scum that looked like shredded mermaid and smelled like a cross between chlorophyll and a yeast infection." Or the portrait of his father's face: "I could not look at it all at once. His round wet eyes, Kilimanjaran nose, lost-cavern nostrils, and geological chin dimple belonged to separate facial ecosystems." On modern, urban Vietnam: "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." My only complaint concerns his sesquipedalian tendencies. Just as his enthusiasm for the minute and eccentric details of history can look like fanaticism, Bissell's occasionally complex and esoteric vocabulary can resemble literary showmanship, not genuine interest in the story being presented. In other words, sometimes the big words overshadowed the narrative. Ultimately, The Father of All Things succeeds as a thought-provoking meditation on the idea of legacy—of family, of history, of war. Bissell asks his father if he remembers the time he admitted he liked war. His father winces, finally answering, "War . . . is an illness caused by youth." This feels like the truest statement of the book. War, like the need for immediate answers and fitting conclusions, like the surety of moral right and the zeal that comes with youth's sense of immortality, is its own legacy. It belongs to the young, to the children of the Vietnam War generation, and soon to the children's children. Bissell's father no longer drinks Johnnie Walker to block out memories, nor does he stay up until four a.m. watching Platoon for the millionth time. He doesn't tell his son that the war was wrong, only that the U.S. military was fragmented. And it doesn't matter because he's let go of the bitterness of the past and passed the proverbial torch of vehemence to his son, who leaves feeling, "Irritated . . . by how [his father] had apparently never paused to wonder if he had been failed because the mission—the initiative—was wrong and immoral . . . how does one reconcile love when the object of one's affection cannot, in one crucial moral arena, see the obvious?" Bissell spends The Father of All Things writing himself out of the black-and-white dichotomies posed by this question, even as he says it on the page—in love and war, there can never be an obvious answer. |