With 30,000 books on Vietnam, why write another? Tom Bissell, born in Escanaba, Michigan, after America’s involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973, says about his 2007 memoir The Father of All Things:
“I bring to the Vietnam War only this: I have spent most of my life thinking about it.”
His father served along with 3 million other Americans in Vietnam and saw combat along with 800,000 of them.
Some years ago Tom and his father John traveled to Vietnam together, and Tom wrote a magazine article about it, not realizing at the time it would develop into an obsession and a book. Tom’s father was deeply troubled after his Vietnam experience, which affected his struggling marriage and the raising of his boys. The trip to Vietnam drew Tom into a consuming exploration of the country, the war, and his own feelings about having a father who served there.
The flyleaf says:
. . . he “explores the many debates about the war, from whether it was winnable to Ho Chi Minh’s motivations to why American leaders lie so often. Above all, he shows how the war has continued to influence American views on foreign policy more than 30 years later.”
He wanted to interweave his emotional experience with the historical facts. He didn’t intend to write about “war’s endless legacy,” but it ended up being inevitable that he did so.
This is Tom’s fourth book, you can read the NYTimes book review here, and I posted about it in March. Back in 1993 I took ENG 453 Contemporary American Poetry with Tom, and our instructor was Professor Diane Wakoski, who became my poet mentor and has remained good friends with Tom. The three of us will have lunch together Monday, along with a couple of students and a fiction writing professor.
My department invited Tom to come back for a visit to talk with current English students about his life in writing. I get to truck him around campus Monday and Tuesday to meet with folks.
In the Introduction, Tom writes:
“War is a force of influence above all else—the most purely distilled form of partisanship ever devised. Yet war’s energies and dark matter are too complicated to allow anyone the certain physics of right and wrong. When war begins, leaders inevitably frown as they promise courage and bravery, guarantee tragic sacrifice, yet vow, all the same, to see it through. What any war’s igniters rarely admit are the small, terrible truths that have held firm for every war ever fought, no matter how necessary or avoidable: This will be horrible, and whatever happens will scar us for decades to come. Indeed, even necessary wars can destroy the trust of people in their leaders, just as war destroys human beings on both sides of the rifle.
War is appetitive. It devours goodwill, landscape, cultures, mothers, and fathers—before finally forcing us, the orphans, to pick up the pieces. These pages are, I hope, a few such pieces.”
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