The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (Vintage Departures)

The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (Vintage Departures) | Tom Bissell | An Essential Personal Tour

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The Father of All ...

	The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (Vintage Departures) Tom Bissell Vintage, 2008 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Father of All Things is a riveting, haunting, and often hilarious account of a veteran and his son?s journey through Vietnam. As his father recounts his experiences as a soldier, including a near fatal injury, Tom Bissell weaves a larger history of the war and explores the controversies that still spark furious debate today. Blending history, memoir, and travelogue, The Father of All Things is a portrait of the war?s personal, political, and cultural impact from the perspective of the generation that grew up in the wake of the conflict. It is also a wise and revelatory book about the bond between fathers and sons.

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"Would you stop the car? I'd like your help beating my son."

This is a searing, honest, and yes, fair account of a young man's reconciliation with his father, against the backdrop of a return to Vietnam.

The dialog Tom records is almost too good to be true, but it's coming out of his tape recorder, so there it is. The elder Bissell comes across as an ordinary, memory-laden senior citizen who happens to once have been a soldier. His drunken implosion, which the author unspools against the fall of Saigon, is a topnotch piece of psychological fiction, but is nothing that the reader catches first-hand from the rest of the book. At times it seems that Tom projects the gook-plinking hophead of media stereotype into his father, but none of that comes out in the dialog. Indeed, at certain points it's the father who has to point out to the son what a bloody horror the war was.

Had Tom been around during the war, he doubtless would have been a protestor. But at this late date, the historical record is in the books. He stitches together quite good second-hand accounts of the fall of South Vietnam, and of the strange career of Ho Chih Minh (though the latter is perhaps somewhat over-basted with "nuance."). An honest fellow, he frequently admits that the North Vietnamese and the NLF were as bad as advertised, and worse than the more conventionally corrupt South. He still refuses to swallow the old wartime lies, though he proposes no way that things could have come out right.

The end of the return tour, with his father raising a toast with a former ARVN his own age, ends the book on a touching and unexpected up note. Mission accomplished.

A fair-use sample:

"A lot of guys I went to basic with died in this place [the Citadel in Hue city]," my father said. "A lot of guys. Guys who joined up again. Guys who kept volunteering. All died right around here." He shook his head.
"Like who?" I asked.
"You don't know them."
"Well, what were their names?"
He looked at me queerly. "What do you care?" This was said with a brusque sort of inquisitiveness, not anger.
I got to my feet. "I'm sorry. You're right. Just morbid curiosity."
My father--the abrupt smile on his face false to anyone who knew him--turned to Hien [the guide]. "What do *you* think?"
Hien regarded his shoes, which looked like small leather noses peeking out from beneath his blue slacks. "I think this is a special place for many people."
My father said nothing and stood there in the wind, amid the grass. When he closed his eyes, it almost looked as though he were listening to someone.

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An Essential Personal Tour

If Tom Bissell wrote a book about the care and storage of Twinkies, I'd buy it. This talented young writer illuminates humanity in all its horror and grandeur with every subject he tackles. And he does this while exploiting his own quirks to humors effect.

In The Father of All Things, Bissell returns to Vietnam with his veteran father. Bissell, guided by his father's first-hand accounts, offers the most lucid description of the salient events of the Vietnam conflict and its major players a reader is apt to find. Unlike a mere history lesson, this book provides a personal tour-- layering the war, the aftermath of a Vietnam vet as a wounded family man, and a time four decades after the fall of Saigon into a compendium of personal insight that illuminates not only screw up that was the war, but the courage of soldiers who did their duty. The honesty in this accord of father and son illuminates the complexity of loving the brave wounded soldiers who do our dirty work. By the end, I loved two Bissell men.

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A Very Large Vision

The question of whether or not anything new is possible in books about Vietnam is a non-question. No one would dare say this about World War II or the Holocaust. And this is especially true if the book offers us a new vision: this time one of multiple points of view, humor, the passion of a young man trying to understand his laconic father, and a brilliant synthesis of historical accounts, both personal testimony and revisionist ideas. His analysis of Vietnamese communism and how it differs from the the communism of other nations is worth the price of the book.

Bissell is prodigiously well read: he does not pretend to have his father's visceral understanding of the war, and he presents himself as sometimes naive and bumbling in the questioning of his father. Both men are revealed as deeply sensitive and hungry for what is true.

As a Vietnam combat veteran, I can attest to the books honesty (some vets will agree with him and some won't).

This is a very important book. It is often not easy to read. The depiction of his father coming to terms with what happened at My Lai is painful and ultimately cathartic. Please read this book.

So much of that horrible piece of history remains undigested in the American psyche, and the young often do not care. Tom Bissell is young, hecares, and he is courageous enough to want to know.

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For What it's Worth

The author has done his homework and created an effective structure for his story. I needed to be taken through My Lai again, but didn't like the journey.

The author's interpretation of history is at least that, an informed reflection. I disagree with some of it, but then I can also write my own book. That he has an informed interpretation of history at all is pretty much a trump card in most American discussions.

While I shouldn't mention it if I will not take the time to provide examples, I will anyway: the writing can sound like a smart boy on his first serious essay.

Often his attitudes on things martial and masculine are comically repellent, reflecting as they do contemporary pieties rather than earned truths. However, is this were my son I'd be proud of the book that he produced.

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No new insights into fathers and son,vets, or the war

As I am unschooled in the detailed history of the Vietnam war, I focus my comments on the other material I expected based on professional reviews of the book.

Specifically, I expected some attempted growth in the father and son's relationship. Nothing huge, which would be unrealistic, but an attempt or a tiny movement. I also expected insight into the effect of a war that divides generations, dominating both the elder who lived it and the younger who were not directly touched by the war but by their wartime fathers.

The book delivered weakly on both counts. Unless, that is, the author's message is that both generations are so traumatized, albeit differently, that neither can soften their assumptions and defenses long enough to begin to understand the other. Instead, they play out their deep attitudinal and behavioral patterns passively and actively. When they do gain a little insight into the other they become angry. Oddly, father and son both seem slightly grateful to have taken their frozen relationship on a road trip to Vietnam. Finally, to find a point about the effect of war on an entire culture, you'd have to use the family as a metaphor for the U.S.

If these were the author's points, he could have expressed them far more effectively, and also more interestingly by exploring and elaborating them. For instance, why is it so difficult for the son to ask questions of his father that could possibly increased understanding? The problem isn't only that the dad's reticent and challenged to explain an inexplicable experience. No, the son also doesn't hear or effectively work with what his dad *does* tell him. Why is this? And, how interesting that it might be harder for those who weren't in the war to embrace the experience of those who were, instead of vice versa?

Another fruitful but unexplored vein was their mutual expectations and assessment of the trip. Why had they each gone, what had they hoped to get out of it, what happened internally for each of them?

Yet another lost opportunity occurred in the majority of the book which was was a discussion of the war organized according to major questions in the son's perspective. These topics, such as "Why were the South Vietnamese Corrupt" and "Could the U.S. Have Won the War", seem to accurately reflect the perspective of those born mid-1970s as the author was. Fair enough. But, how much more interesting it would have been to to compare, contrast, and connect the son's major questions about the war with his father's!

There are plenty of places where a hungry reader might think the author's about to do something interesting like this, but he never really does. If you've followed the war coverage in major newspapers or magazines during the last several years, you're not going to gain much additional insight here. Unless, of course, the historical interpretation is accurate, which I'm not in a position to judge, but other reviewers have cast doubt on.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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