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The Father of All Things A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam by Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 199697) Pantheon March 2007 432 pages $25.00 |
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Reviewed by John Krauskopf (Iran 196567) |
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TOM BISSELL TELLS US in his author’s note at the beginning of The Father of All Things![]() First, in the main section of the book titled “An Illness Caused by Youth,” he arranges to take his Marine veteran father, John Bissell, on a trip back to Vietnam. The observations and comments of the father are a springboard for the son to fill in for the reader some of the background he has gathered by researching a significant portion of those thirty thousand volumes. (His bibliography lists 121 titles, with many evaluative comments about the sources.) Second, in order to try to bring some order to what he and his father see and the random data uncovered by his reading, Bissell poses a series of questions such as “Why did officials at all levels of the U.S. military and government lie so often during the war?” and “Could the U.S. have won the war in Viet Nam?” The first section of the book (90 pages), titled “The Fall,” focuses on Tom’s attempt to reconstruct how his combat-veteran father felt on learning the news of the fall of Saigon at his home in Escanaba, Michigan, and contrasts this with a detailed account of the chaotic last days of South Vietnam. Tom shows us the incongruity between John Bissell’s sense of what might have been or should have been, and the reality of the anarchic evacuation of the remaining American diplomatic and civilian personnel and a portion of the many compromised South Vietnamese nationals. His father’s personal war experience was revivified by news of the fall of Saigon eight years after his tour, and his frustration that his righteous martial effort in the early part of the war didn’t lead to victory was starkly reinforced by the spring 1975 media reports from that city. Bissell is sure that this sense of the futility of his father’s sacrifice and the sacrifices in the cohesive military unit that the Marines built around him contributed to the break-up of his parents’ marriage. He is also sure that other aspects of his father’s personality and the father-son relationship are strongly influenced by John Bissell’s Vietnam combat experience as a 30-year-old. The joint trip by John and Tom to modern day Vietnam is part of a not wholly successful effort by Tom who is not a combat veteran to understand the war’s influence on his father. As a non-military visitor in Vietnam in 1969, I was struck hard by the absurdities of the war then raging. Bissell recounts two examples that are exact parallels to illogicalities I witnessed. In writing about Da Lat, a mountain resort area, Bissell wrote,
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.” |
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After ten years of involvement in international student exchange with Experiment for International Living, John Krauskopf spent more than two decades as the foreign student adviser and director of the English as a Second Language Institute in Millbrae, California before retiring. He is now writing a book about his international experiences. |
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