Inheriting the War Read online

  away from my solid, still form on the chair—

  my spirit stood with them,

  as tall and square boned.

  Then, a grunt named Joe, just like you

  dad, took my lucent hand and bade me leap

  through the carpet, then the concrete,

  till we struck soil and traveled southwest,

  bypassing pearlescent grubs essential for decomposition.

  Soon, we launched out of earth,

  through the hardwood lobby floor of the Hastings Hotel—

  one of Hollywood’s un-retrofitted relics

  housing hookers, actors, and castaways

  in its dull efficiencies.

  I arrived unarmed,

  hoping the troll recon said was you was not

  you. This troll seemed busy,

  bloated, and badly hunched. Like me,

  he had audible words for invincible invisible companions.

  His hair was pomaded black,

  long, magnetic. I let go of Joe,

  set my sights on that scurrying thing and spoke

  with what turned out to be your smooth voice

  in my stiff mouth. Oh, you were lovely

  if I looked away and only listened:

  You are not mine,

  the troll that was you whispered distinctly.

  Swiftly, my own

  invincible invisible companions scattered

  like one body

  hit hard by a betty bomb.

  IV.

  The Hastings Hotel door seemed to swallow

  you—you left me

  to find my way out of a lobby existence

  again. On tenterhooks,

  I ordered my grunts to stay

  the course, and they clambered to me,

  out from behind potted plastic plants

  and from under scuffed ottomans. They wrenched me

  down through the floor and the fault lines,

  then up into a disfigured barroom

  serving you the thick liquids of our Azor ancestry.

  Our entire lineage drank through you—

  I could see in you our kin layered atop one another,

  numbing their own petty crimes,

  their saudade.

  What he does for the Azor kin corrupts

  their trust in him—their hometown hero,

  the soldiers reported, as I eyed the hoards

  of thick haired pearl hunters and stocky fishwives

  attached to you,

  their infant eyes gaping.

  Their eyes flashing

  like drumfire through the pattern on my living-room carpet

  back in the Valley where I woke

  from the barroom visitation to spy my

  beloved platoon.

  I asked them if I was doomed

  to be a crowded bar. They said, When your father dies

  the ancestors must possess you.

  Understand, little soldier—

  they will not be able to help themselves.

  I understood

  that eventually you would acknowledge me—

  you would live among their ranks

  and I would order Abstinence and Attention

  and possibly the dressing of all wounds.

  ADAM KARLIN was born in Washington, DC, and raised in rural southern Maryland. His father, Wayne Karlin, served in the United States Marine Corps in Vietnam and is professor of Languages and Literature at College of Southern Maryland. Adam has worked as a journalist and travel writer in Asia, Africa, Australia, and North America, including stints as a desk editor at The Vientiane Times (Laos) and The Nation (Thailand). His writing has appeared in the BBC, World Hum, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Lens, among other publications, and he has written almost 60 guidebooks for Lonely Planet. He currently lives in New Orleans with his wife and daughter.

  HOW I DIDN’T FIND MY FATHER’S WAR IN VIETNAM

  When I went to Vietnam searching out the battlefields of my father, I wanted it to be another time, all the time. Sometimes I wanted it to be the past. Sometimes I was sick of the past. But whatever the present was, it prickled my skin like hot needles.

  Anything modern made my mind lapse into a made-up nostalgia for what I call “film Vietnam.” In a Saigon bar I wanted heat thick enough to boil and bubble the beer, like the beef-rich globules of fat that refract across a good bowl of pho. The heat would be thick and orange. It wouldn’t just sit in the canopy of the bar ceiling (You use the word canopy my mind interrupted because every description of Vietnam has to include some reference to triple-canopy jungle. But this isn’t the jungle. It’s a bar for lonely Australian civil engineers) but be pushed around with a dusty cough by a slowly whump whump whumping ceiling fan made of rattan or teak or some other exotic wood-y noun. But there was no slow fan.

  It was freezing; an air conditioner was set to full blast. Outside the night was sticky enough to inspire Graham Greene to spill prose about post-colonial ennui and lost love, but in here the air had an arctic bite. A boon for the engineers, who had done stints in the Persian Gulf and were used to switching out exterior heat for interior chill, but bumpkiss for my fantasy.

  Plus, in my old school dreams the Doors would probably play, but Coldplay was on the sound system. Coldplay and the Corrs. 2002 was buzzkilling my Vietnam bar scene trope.

  I was a college senior, awash in waves of Humanities departments and sick of them. I was done deconstructing. Wanted something sincere and solid. To be a writer. Not just a writer, but a travel writer. A trip to Vietnam seemed like a good step along both paths. Go to another country and search for . . . what, exactly? Well, my dad had fought in the Vietnam War, but “searching for my father” sounded a cliché away from a Hallmark card. That said, quests for paternal identity are a time honored way of Becoming A Writer (even if, my College Degree whispered to me, I was not searching for a past but re-appropriating the present from another past experience.

  [Shut your post-modern mouth, my mind snapped]).

  But the College Degree was right: Vietnam wasn’t my past. It was my father’s. And I already knew my father well, could know him better by sitting with him over a cup of coffee back in Maryland or reading one of his own books—dad was already a writer—as opposed to dodging in and out of bars in Vietnam.

  But that wasn’t as romantic. Plus the travel writer part required, well, travel. My present self wants to tell younger self: fine, go. Just don’t spend too much time in those bars. You’ll get to know them later in life. You’ll be intimately acquainted with Southeast Asian Nightlife Joint 1.0: vaguely bamboo chic décor, Tiger beer in frosty mugs, English football on TV, karaoke. A few Singaporean businessmen roaring at each other. Dusting of young Vietnamese, giggling at their nouveau riche-ness. Local Chinese, red-faced, puffy and loud. Tired Australian expatriates. The usual crop of hippie-chic backpackers.

  I’m pretty sure the bar was named the Blue Gecko. “Blue” and a reptile definitely featured prominently. Par for the course for Southeast Asian backpacker bars.

  Bars in Saigon. And Hue. And Hoi An. And Nha Trang. And Da Lat. And Hanoi. Did they all count towards the identity quest? Dad wasn’t in Hanoi during the war, obviously, and a part of me felt like seeing that city was eluding my purpose; I went to find my father’s war, not sightseeing. Sightseeing made me a tourist, and in my self-importance, I wanted to feel larger than that.

  But in Vietnam, being a tourist and being seeker of the past, specifically the past generations’ wars, are often the same. The Vietnamese know foreigners come to their home suffused with images of, as they call it, the American War. A war with its own soundtrack (CCR, the Animals, Jimi Hendrix) and celebrities (Charlie Sheen, Tom Hanks), an entire set of cultural signifiers set to “All Along the Watchtower.” India promises spirituality; Italy cuisine; Egypt the pyramids and Vietnam, often enough, the war: marketed, prepackaged and sold to thousands of true seekers.

  The cynicism—mine or the marketers or both—wore m
e down. I went from the DMZ to the Mekong Delta to the Central Highlands, a litany of “War Tours.” Asking: what am I looking for in Vietnam? More specifically: when was I looking for? Nha Trang, Part A: a beach town overwhelmed with pink-faced Russian tourists who tossed endless reserves of money and insults at locals. Part B: the hometown of Mr. Nguyen, family friend, who fled as a boat person to the Philippines and smuggled himself to America to become a NASA engineer. Was Da Nang pocked with dust and Chinese construction equipment and foremen? Or was it the port where dad first landed in Vietnam? Were the Cu Chi tunnels a network of underground passages used by the Viet Cong to attack American infrastructure, or a theme park where tourists could empty AK-47 clips into paper targets? Pencil in: C) All of the above.

  You could even get laughs and franchising out of the war. In the “DMZ Bar” in Hue, where backpackers watched Premier League football while rocking to Fogarty belting “It Ain’t Me” (one Swedish twenty-something proudly showed me how much the soundtrack in the bar synched with “Battlefield: Vietnam,” his new first person shooter video game), I watched a Dutch and French tourist reenact a scene from Rambo. Using the live end of a flickering light bulb, they pretended to give each other electroshock torture. Their friends laughed. The Vietnamese bar staff laughed. I laughed. Roughly 40 years earlier, in this same city, roughly 6,000 Vietnamese were tortured in a similar manner before they were shot or buried alive by re-conquering Viet Cong and North Vietnamese during the Tet Offensive.

  If the war was far enough from me to laugh at a crude parody of its atrocities, it seemed almost as distant to the Vietnamese. Publicly, Vietnam wears the war, its David moment against a geopolitical Goliath, proudly on its sleeve. Scan a Vietnamese newspaper on a national holiday: the state-certified line gushes victory, victory, victory, memorializes the cause, as well as wars of resistance against the French and Chinese. Vietnam is free. Vietnam is independent. Vietnam is often defined, essentially, in negative terms: not American, not French, not Chinese.

  Which begs the question: what, then, is Vietnam? Sixty percent of its population was born after 1975. If officialdom uses the war as a propaganda crutch, they also encouraged the practical attitude on the street: “Everything-is-over-the-past-is-the-past-so-let’s-do-business.” Outside of the afore-mentioned tourist sector and Communist party iconography, the war is distant to daily life, unless you were one of those unlucky enough to lose a limb or a family member or a friend, and to be fair, millions are in that demographic. But most young Vietnamese—which is to say, most Vietnamese—don’t bear those bad memories. Even those blacklisted Southerners whose family members fought on the side of the Americans are more concerned about escaping history than remembering it. Vietnamese aren’t apathetic to their nation’s history of resistance struggles. But the ones I met who were under 40 seemed aware of those conflicts as a dim source of feel-good nationalism, and nothing more—the way many Americans perceive their own formative history.

  I was noticing all of this, trying to figure out how the Vietnamese saw the war, because all my ways of looking for it seemed to prevent me from seeing the country as it was. Vietnam was not becoming a magical travel catharsis. I’m a member of the Eat Pray Love generation, conditioned to expect growth from a journey, which itself is a fairly presumptuous word to describe what was, in many ways, a three week vacation. But I was selfishly indignant at being denied what was my right as an American—to turn a country into a melodramatic chapter of my own story.

  In a way, this was how America treated the nation of Vietnam during the Cold War: stage prop in a geopolitical drama. Vietnam was never its own country with its own people with their own history. It was a peg the US was going to hammer into the circle-shaped hole of the Cold War Communist-Containment Foreign Policy Playset. The problem was: Vietnam wasn’t circle-shaped. It was Vietnam-shaped. Robert McNamara was unhappy with his toy when all his hammering didn’t reshape it into his vision.

  I bashed away in a similarly futile manner. I wanted to be inspired by Vietnam, while ignoring that the Vietnam War I sought, as opposed to Vietnam the country, was a font of pain and loss. The lessons of the war stemmed from trauma, and there was an uncomfortable conflict voyeurism to seeking the aftermath of that trauma out.

  But writing doesn’t have to come from trauma. It can also come from experience. I had been experiencing the country of Vietnam while I had been looking for its wars. Ever since I arrived, those two ideas, war and nation, bore the same name and the same identity. They were inseparable in my head, even though they were separate in reality.

  The tension between war and place had driven my trip. I wanted to split them, but doing so ultimately happened, ironically, by bringing the two Vietnams together, in a way personal to my father and I, but—I hoped—respectful of Vietnam.

  I was staying in Hoi An, about an hour from Marble Mountain, the location of one of my dad’s major airbases. I rented a motorbike and drove to the mountain and climbed it: fists of granite and sharp rocks, cracks of sunlight slanting through cave ceilings, handfuls of sharp, shrubby grass. Here and there, embedded in the mountain, bullet holes and Buddhist shrines. An old lady with betel-blackened teeth approached me and thrust a bundle of joss sticks in my hands. She indicated I should bring it to the top of the mountain. I thought: I came here because of my dad, but “here” is Vietnamese. Follow the rules.

  I cradled the incense. A stony scrabble later and I was on top of the mountain, where I lit the bundle, wedged it between porous rocks, dagger-sharp pumice. Blue smoke curled out in lost ribbons. I said a prayer to Jim Childers, a helicopter gunner who switched missions with my dad and was subsequently killed. My father touches his name every time he visits the black wall in Washington DC.

  All around, highways tangling, clipped asphalt yarn in green checkerboards of rice paddies and dark knives of jungle. In the distance, a corn-hued lip of sand and the flushed ocean kissing the sky. The blue smoke of the joss sticks vapored over the mountain, carrying my prayers away from a beautiful moment—but not an epiphany. Because the moment wasn’t perfect. The wind blew the joss sticks about. Loud Irish tourists interrupted my solitude, cursing the heat and the climb. My own ankle was swelling from slipping and sliding on rocks.

  The moment wasn’t perfect. But it was real, I thought, and so is Vietnam, which I am maybe seeing for the first time, through its own joss stick smoke and rituals and land and sea and sky. This was now, in Vietnam. I clattered down the mountain to my motorbike, kicked it into gear, and went home.

  ELMO KEEP is an Australian writer and journalist in America, published with Matter, The Awl, Vice, The Verge, The International New York Times, The Rumpus, The Lifted Brow, The Best Australian Science Writing 2015, and many others. In her 10 years of writing and reporting, Elmo’s work has taken her around Australia, to London, Paris, Latin America, Greenland, through the Northwest Passage, across 28 US states, and to Vietnam, where she retraced her father’s steps where he served in counterintelligence during the war in Saigon and Long Tan.

  THE BOOK I DIDN’T WRITE

  I didn’t write the book because the thought of it made me feel vaguely ill at all times. Even when I wasn’t thinking about it directly I was thinking about it. None of the thoughts were good.

  I didn’t write the book because it was a book about betrayal that could only be facilitated by my betrayal of other people, many of whom had already been betrayed. This wouldn’t have been a clever metatextual commentary on the nature of betrayal; it would have just been really quite mean of me, and sad.

  I didn’t write the book because I thought that in the end it would not be interesting. Every day I wondered who would care about the story. There are only so many books that each of us can read in a lifetime; why would this book be one of them? The enterprise of writing—or not writing—the book took on the tenor of the absurd in my mind because it would have hurt no small number of people, and for me to dig around in their lives to turn them into Characters with a Point To Make was
not a moral calculus which would ever come out with me in the black.

  I had gotten as far as an epigraph:

  We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful about who we pretend to be.

  This was also a problem. In this one sentence, Kurt Vonnegut had elegantly expressed everything I’d hoped I might say in an entire book.

  There were also roughly forty thousand words, written over two years, mostly useless, arranged into folders that I liked to move around. One day I dragged them over to the little trash icon and they disappeared with that noise meant to mimic crunching up paper.

  The book was about secrets—the personal, complicated kind—about what constituted love, and what did not. But the secrets were not mine to tell. I thought a lot about their corrosive nature, and how so much could have been avoided if only people hadn’t kept secrets. But I could not resolve the conflict of a story that was not mine. So the secrets stay buried.

  Sometimes I thought I imagined the voice of my father, who has been dead for ten years, imploring me to just not do this, please, though he would have never said “please.” I could tell you that for certain; what else he would say, I have no idea. My father was a complete stranger to me, even though I had known him for all of my life. The whole point of the book was that I might be able to find out who he was, if I could just uncover enough evidence, enough facts, stir enough ghosts.

  My father was not a good man; he was what an objective reader might call a terrible person. This presents what is known as the unsympathetic lead. It also presents what will be familiar to all children of narcissists—a great deal of various awfulness that will haunt you in a seemingly unending number of ways for most of your life, until you decide that you are going to actively undo it.

  My father stole people’s money, was prone to flights of unhinged fabrications—mostly concerning his self-professed genius—and frequently unleashed truly terrifying maelstroms of pure, animalistic, verbal rage. He meddled in other people’s affairs because he was bored and vindictive; when not doing this, he shut himself in a room during the day and slept for hours, then roamed the house all night. It was like living with a caged bear that was also responsible for ensuring your welfare, such as it was. By the end of his life at sixty-four he had alienated everybody he knew. He died alone and broke in a rooming house, and that is kind of poetic, but it’s also something that, when I think about it, makes me feel like a plastic container crumpled in on itself.