Dissecting Vietnam Myths
WHITNEY, CRAIG R.
Dissecting Vietnam Myths The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam By Tom Bissell Pantheon. 407 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Craig R. Whitney Assistant managing...
...Under Ho Chi Minh it was a Communist state founded on the struggle against French colonialism and following the defeat of the French in 1954, against what many people, not Communists alone, saw as American neocolonialism in Vietnam— and that was all...
...But the North Vietnamese kept infiltrating...
...You want to tell me what happened...
...An example is the following on the entry for Larry Heinemann’s book Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam: “Weirdest—and perhaps most revealing—moment: A Vietnamese veteran of the war tells Heinemann that he read Whitman, Twain, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway and gave lectures on them to North Vietnamese troops on their way to the front...
...The father did not much want to see the place, having become acquainted after the war with Captain Ernest Medina, commander of Lieutenant William Calley, the lead perpetrator of the My Lai atrocities...
...air power...
...Put it behind...
...Then,’ Heinemann writes, ‘Professor Lien asked in all earnest seriousness what Vietnamese literature had the United States Army taught me during the war.’” Live and learn, Tom Bissell’s book tells us, or be condemned to repeat the errors of the past...
...I honestly don’t remember...
...Three decades pass, and on the trip the old man initially seems not much interested in looking back...
...the son asks, turning on a tape recorder and telling us: “This was mostly a courtesy, since I knew what happened...
...he urges...
...Exasperated at one point, the father tells his son he does not know much about war, “Except that I was in one, apparently...
...My father was shot—in the back, buttock, arm, and shoulder—at the beginning of a roadside melee and was dragged to safety by a black Marine...
...At times, as in their visit to the 18thcentury imperial citadel in Hue, where Marines fought one of the bloodiest battles of the war after the Communist countrywide Tet uprisings in 1968, both the elder Bissell—who had left the Corps by then— and the Vietnamese tour guide get a bit testy about what happened...
...But Tom keeps trying, even when it means debunking a myth of his own making after they come to Tuy Phuoc, the small coastal village where his father was badly wounded leading a platoon on a search-and-destroy mission in late 1965 or early 1966 (the date is not clear...
...But no: As Heraclitus said, war is “the father of all things...
...Millions of South Vietnamese who had looked to the United States as their salvation fled the country by boat or stayed and suffered repression until the Vietnamese Communists, like their one-time Chinese allies, saw that letting people have economic freedom was the only way they could hold onto political power...
...They were more determined to win “independence” for their country than our poorly-led South Vietnamese allies were to stop them...
...Incidents like My Lai happened frequently, just not that severely, the father hints as they pull up to Son My, the hamlet where the Vietnamese present the atrocities to visitors...
...When the Communists resumed their offensive in 1975, Nguyen Van Thieu’s corrupt Southern government was unable to hold them off without American air support and quickly ran...
...But it all became such a mess...
...Reviewed by Craig R. Whitney Assistant managing editor, New York “Times” IF ALL SONS learned even a tenth as much about their fathers’ wars as Tom Bissell has learned about the war his father, John Bissell, fought as a Marine off icer in Vietnam, the United States would be in a much better place than it is today...
...Tom Bissell’s book is a deconstruction of Vietnam myths, as unsparing of the pretense of principled heroism spread by the Vietnamese Communist leaders about themselves as it is of American self-delusion about how the South Vietnamese would have won if the news media had not sabotaged the U.S...
...Today, the Vietnamese welcome American veterans, tourists and investors, and people in Hanoi and Saigon have economic freedom...
...We were all a long way from home...
...He felt his service and sacrifice had been for naught...
...The system is now about as corrupt, Vietnamese grumble when out of their earshot, as Thieu’s was...
...But the Communist Party still holds a monopoly on political power and the police, if less intrusive than in the dark days of 197585, are still around...
...It was an occasion only for survival and death...
...How could you lose in Vietnam, Tom asks, when there were so many hundreds of thousands of you there...
...His father says of course he does...
...But the Vietnamese had been fighting the Chinese for millennia...
...So is the massacre later in 1968 by American soldiers of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, a stop on the Bissells’ tour too...
...They fought abrief war with China once more in 1979, after reunifying their country with its help...
...And probably more than I should...
...One of the war’s casualties had been his parents’ marriage in 1977, three years after he was born and two years after North Vietnam’s Communist armies conquered the South...
...His father says the convoy had to stop on a road blocked by a huge earthen mound...
...That collapse, the son imagines in the opening part of the book, left his father, who had been wounded in Vietnam and was a Marine Corps captain when he returned to civilian life, in a permanent rage...
...This wasn’t our country,” his father struggles to answer...
...Then why do I remember you being shot, and a black Marine dragging you to safety...
...My platoon sergeant hauled me into a ditch . . . I thought I was going to die...
...Ye t here we are in Iraq, again a long way from home in a country few of us understand, three full years after going in to overthrow a dictator allied with terrorists and armed with weapons of mass destruction—except that it turns out he wasn’t...
...When unnecessary, it was unforgivable...
...And we are rotating troops back home as soon as they have discovered how to distinguish among insurgents, Saddamite irredentists, Shiite and Sunni militias, allies, and innocent bystanders...
...In 1973 the United States, having lost its stomach for the war, bombed Hanoi into a cease-fire and withdrew its remaining combat units...
...War, when necessary, was unspeakable...
...You’ll never understand...
...Was the sergeant who pulled you into the ditch black...
...To regard war in any other way only guaranteed its reappearance...
...A decade after Vietnam, seeking revenge against the Soviets for invading Afghanistan, the United States embraced an Islamic fundamentalist insurgency there that had little in common with American democracy and later spawned the Taliban and Al Qaeda, both now resurgent despite more than five years of “war on terror...
...They are able finally to agree only that Hue is a special place for many people...
...But his son more than makes up for that, interweaving travelogue and family dialectic with vivid historical lectures his father probably had little patience for—reconstructions of key political and military events in Vietnam, including the American evacuation at the end of April 1975...
...At another, he quips, “War is an illness caused by youth...
...We seem to have learned little from the short tours of combat duty in Vietnam—the Marines had the longest ones, and they were only 13 months...
...Does he have any sympathy for the victims, the author asks...
...When young Bissell says he wishes they had all hanged, Medina especially, Bissell senior tells him, “You weren’t here...
...This meant that in a war in a strange culture where few Americans could speak the language, a war that was as much about the interplay of complex political and historical forces as about the clash of opposing armies, Americans who had just figured out the complexities often found themselves replaced by others as ignorant as they had been when they first arrived...
...Yes, American and South Vietnamese forces did largely succeed in eliminating indigenous South Vietnamese Communist forces after they rose up in the 1968 Tet holidays, but that shifted the war into a main-force conflict between the North Vietnamese Army and American and South Vietnamese forces, which remained heavily dependent on U.S...
...How that war affected him and his father is what Tom Bissell wanted both of them to try to understand on a journey, their first together to Vietnam, in November 2003...
...And for his friend Captain Medina...
...Although Moscow and Beijing supported the Communist insurgency against the American-supported South Vietnamese state, as the author points out, at least they were backing a Communist system like their own...
...Yeah, I do...
...A collection of interviews, it includes perceptions such as this one from an 80-year-old Communist in Hanoi: “We tried to be good...
...All bad memories...
...I remember that everyone was crying...
...Some of what is left behind for other children of the war, both Vietnamese and American, is presented in the book’s last section...
...war effort by portraying the Tet uprising as a Communist victory rather than a defeat...
...So that ended my war for a while...
...His childhood need to think of his father as a hero had led him to distort the truth, Tom realizes...
...Eventually his wife, Muffin, South Carolina-raised and out of her element among “unlettered, diphthongshunning rubes” in northern Michigan where Bissell had taken the family, found him impossible to live with...
...It was not an occasion for heroism...
...Do not miss the final 20 pages of The Father of All Things, a critical Bibliography that not only points to excellent sources for further insights from Vietnamese, American and European authors, but has delightful asides...
...While they were trying to figure out what to do, the mound suddenly exploded, raking everybody with steel and shrapnel...
...Secretary of State Dean Rusk said in Congressional hearings then that the security threat the United States confronted in Vietnam was the prospect of a billion Chinese armedwithnuclear weapons...
...The cruel, deliberate way the Communists went about assassinating their political rivals during the few weeks they held Hue is fully recounted here...
...Young Bissell tells us all this, yet his dad says at the end of their trip that Vietnam is a happier place than it was when he was fighting there, and probably happier than it would have been now if the United States had won the war...
...I don’t think so...
...North Vietnam was never an agent of Chinese and Soviet Communism intent on taking over South Vietnam and the “dominoes” of Southeast Asia...
...I have no idea...
Vol. 90 • March 2007 • No. 2
