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OM BISSELL TELLS US in his author’s note at the beginning of The Father of All Things that there are thirty thousand books on Vietnam currently in print. Thousands of journalists, participants, and scholars have sensed the importance of that war in recent American history and its influence on the American psyche and tried to make sense of it for themselves and others. What he doesn’t say is that many of the previous efforts are dry and almost unreadable while other authors are self-serving and, therefore, unreliable guides for someone trying to understand Vietnam. Bissell has produced a book that takes the reader through the complexities of Vietnamese history and the American involvement in the war in a compelling and absorbable way using two literary devices.
     

An ARVN [South Vietnamese] military academy had been located here, as had an NLF [Viet Cong] villa for tired vacation-needing guerillas. Both sides were aware of the other, but there is no record that any of them exchanged anything but dark glances in the market.

In a second example, Tom describes an unspoken “gentlemen’s agreement” similar to one I observed during my ten days in the Mekong Delta town of My Tho. Bissell reported an ARVN commander’s response to a question about why he didn’t choose a more favorable campground. “The Viet Cong already occupy [that campground]” To the follow up question, “Why don’t you go after the VC?” the commander replied, “As long as we don’t bother them, they won’t bother us.”
     For some of the more sensitive of the American personnel the bitterest memories they carried from the war are of times when one of these “gentlemen’s agreements” were breached. I was taken to a scene where a land mine had blown up a road grader and killed a couple of Navy Seabees who were scraping out an irrigation canal for a village. The Americans had thought that there was a “gentlemen’s agreement” in place with the local guerillas for the irrigation project to be protected. The sense comes through Bissell’s writing that this kind of betrayal of the helping hand offered by the military was what had affected his father the most.
     At the end of the book is a 20-page section titled “The Children of the War Speak.” Eighteen American and Vietnamese children remember their Vietnam War veteran parents. They appear to be responding to the unstated question, “How did the war shape your parent’s personality and your relationship?” This was Bissell’s question to himself, and his answer took a whole book. After reading the brief and thoughtful but anonymous responses of the children of the veterans, I was left wanting to know more of their situations, perhaps not another Bissell length book, but more.
     Tom Bissell’s writing skill as well as his careful research lifts The Father of All Things above most of its many predecessors. Describing the boat traffic in the Perfume River in Hue he writes, “Large tourist ‘dragon boats,’ painted a cheerfully ugly mixture of blue and yellow and green, chugged down the Perfume’s center, leaving a wake that looked as though the river were being unzipped.” In providing some background for the conflict Tom notes, “Landlords had been despised in Vietnam long before the social abacus of Communism slid them over into a distinct class.”
     Bissell does not restrict himself to the standard narrative form, and the book’s three-section format and the rhetorical questions work well. However, in the first section, use of the grammatical second person to convey what he has learned of his father’s wartime and post-war life through the 1975 fall of Saigon does not work as smoothly. This is only a minor distraction in a book that is both a sensitive personal narrative and a powerful synthesis of Vietnam War era history.
     The Father of All Things may help veterans and Americans who supported U.S. involvement in Vietnam come to terms with their feelings as John Bissell started to do on this journey. For others who protested the war and contemplated life in Canada, the book’s historical narrative will confirm with riveting and carefully researched detail what they had suspected all along.