Inheriting the War Read online

  discover you, and I would not

  turn you in; I would not make

  you face your wife, or Dallas,

  or the co-pilot, Jim. You

  could return to your crazy

  orbiting, and I would not try

  to fully understand what

  it means to you. All I know

  is this: when I see you,

  as I have seen you at least

  once every year of my life,

  spin across the wilds of the sky

  like a tiny, African god,

  I feel dead. I feel as if I were

  the residue of a stranger’s life,

  that I should pursue you.

  My head cocked toward the sky,

  I cannot get off the ground,

  and, you, passing over again,

  fast, perfect, and unwilling

  to tell me that you are doing

  well, or that it was mistake

  that placed you in that world,

  and me in this; or that misfortune

  placed these worlds in us.

  —James Tate

  INTRODUCTION

  James Tate’s poem “The Lost Pilot,” published in 1967 when he was 24 years old, provides one framework—or tradition—to begin this conversation. Through an act of imagination and through a life of questions and research, the son attempts to assemble his own identity by recovering the fragments of his father, a World War II pilot. In the year the poem was written, Tate had become older than his father at the time of his death. In a Paris Review interview with poet Charles Simic, Tate, who was born during his father’s deployment, said he had spent much of his life piecing together his father’s disappearance: “I was never given straight answers as a child. I was told that my father was never found. . . . I have since utterly verified that he is in a military graveyard near Liege. . . . Was he killed in the crash? Did he parachute out? I don’t know.” For Tate, the loss of his father and the brutality of war have instilled these questions and have charged him with the relentless task of unearthing the past.

  When one inherits the residue of a parent’s experience of war—whether a momentary disruption in time and place, the phantom weight of a weapon or the stench of a village in flames, the perpetual suffering of exile—one also inherits an abstraction, maybe in the form of total silence, or in the form of a family history told and retold at the dinner table. But the said and unsaid leave only impressions. What descendants of war witness may persist in the body of the parent, though much is left to the imagination and to a perpetual search.

  It is through a dialog with the past that one begins the work of reconstruction; thus, this collection conjures pasts—personal and historical. Pursuit becomes a motif throughout the collection: adult sons and daughters travel across temporal landscapes, or even across oceans, to retrace their parent’s footsteps. Poet Gardner McFall, in her poem “On the Line,” writes of an actual and metaphorical search for her father, a Navy pilot who disappeared during a mission: “I am traveling fast, propelled / by you, doing what I must, / ready to answer for it.” Karen Russell goes underground through the Cu Chi tunnels and writes that she’d hoped “the tunnels might be a literal portal, a way to enter the deep grammar of [her] dad’s past.” Brian Ma writes of his own journey to Vietnam, “I came for a reason / but his prison is a school now, / my family’s house a pharmacy.” The search is an attempt at creating dimension. Adam Karlin also follows in his father’s footsteps, though he does not find the war in Vietnam, but rather a place where, yes, once the war existed, along with the landscapes, and a people, and a culture that can be traced back nearly four millennium—one that survives, and, in fact, flourishes. Through pursuit, Karlin transforms the once mythical place, defined by the limits of his imagination, into a real one. He writes, “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.” Sadly, the Western experience of Vietnam has been perceived as little more than a theme-park for war, a monument to recent history.

  The first American troops were deployed to Vietnam just over 50 years ago in March of 1965, shortly after the departure of the French. This arrival was expected: in fact, there was a saying—leave one grave open for the first American. Over the next ten years, the conflict escalated (along with guerrilla tactics and the use of the most aggressive machinery, technology, and chemical warfare of the time) until it officially ended with the fall of Saigon (known in Vietnam as “Liberation Day”) in April 1975 when the last flights of soldiers—American and South Vietnamese Army—and civilians evacuated, and when those Vietnamese who could escaped on boats they navigated by the stars across tumultuous waters for refugee camps in the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand (many were later granted access to the United States, Australia, Canada, France, and elsewhere).

  Yet, there are 58,307 names on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC—the reflective black granite a metaphorical portal into an underworld where the dead wander and the war persists. Vietnam veterans who stare into the granite see their own faces in the cemetery stone in the year where they will find the names of their comrades. We must mourn our dead. We must recover them. But what we seldom hear of are the millions of unnamed casualties—more than 2.5 million Vietnamese: 1.1 million North Vietnamese soldiers, approximately 250,000 South Vietnamese Army soldiers, and 2 million civilians; more than 500 Australian soldiers; and 3,000 South Korean soldiers. We seldom hear of those soldiers—American and Vietnamese—and civilians who have died due to illnesses related to exposure to Agent Orange, or to other war-related injuries, since the end of the war. How do we reflect on these casualties? How can we, now, 50 years after the war, removed from the tension of our political past, understand the larger truth—that we all endure the aftershocks.

  For those who survived, the course of their lives was altered for generations to come. This collection is not intended as a history of the Vietnam War, nor as a political statement about that war, but an account of its complicated aftermath. Yes, the descendants of these soldiers—career military personnel and draftees, and from the many perspectives—American, South Vietnamese, Vietnamese, Australian, Khmer, Hmong, Laotian—have sometimes retold war stories. But more importantly, the collection conveys the way war has entered into the imagination of this generation, and the tremendous work that these writers have enacted to understand. It has come into our houses and has kept us awake at night trying to bridge the clinical distance of history. It has provoked us to interrogate the past until the unknowable becomes a vivid landscape, until the ghosts have names and faces, until the boats stop swaying. It has asked us to reckon with many kinds of grief the war has given us.

  But what do the children of war inherit? The question is political but also deeply personal. The word inheritance is a conceptual term, but also a biological and social one. In war, soldiers—from all sides—experience, witness, and perform acts of violence; they face the perplexing reality of mortality on a daily basis, and, then, if they survive, return to live their lives. But realities such as reintegration or relocation can be deeply affecting. Studies report that the families of war veterans, especially children, may suffer post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. These struggles are not merely psychological, but—in the deep connection between brain and body—physiological. Over the last several years, researchers have studied this long-term physiological inheritance. For decades now, research has shown that the offspring of a parent exposed to Agent Orange is four times more likely to suffer biological effects, including birth defects, cancer, and other illnesses. (In the US, such individuals are often denied claims by Veterans Affairs and their illnesses remain unacknowledged; in Vietnam, the effect of chemical warfare is even more drastic as the toxin polluted the land, food supply, and water.)

  In this way, the correlation between the parent’s body chemistry and the geneti
c health of the offspring seems apparent. But, also, the body houses emotion, and the emotional and nervous systems indeed translate into the physical. Recent research has begun to examine how even trauma may be inherited from a parent. In a TED-X statement, Tori Egherman recounts these studies. She reflects on laboratory research by neuroscientist Isabelle Mansuy and her colleagues at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who have demonstrated that trauma is a trait that can be passed on to offspring. She reports:

  [T]he offspring of mice who experienced high levels of trauma experienced high levels of stress and depression. . . . The scientists showed that the stress and depression were passed on genetically, rather than socially, by injecting sperm into mice who had not undergone trauma.

  She connects this research to the “children of survivors” by citing author and science editor Virginia Hughes:

  People who were traumatized during the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia tended to have children with depression and anxiety, for example, and children of Australian veterans of the Vietnam War have higher rates of suicide than the general population.

  Understanding that a parent’s experience of trauma could appear socially, or biologically through genetic expression in their children, leaves a great deal to think about.

  Whether through a genetic inheritance, or through a social one, in the imagination, and sometimes in the body, the history of a parent converges with one’s own personal history. Carl Jung, in Dreams, teaches us, “Return to childhood is always the return to father and mother, to the whole burden of the psychic non-ego as represented by the parents, with its long and momentous history. Regression spells disintegration into our historical and hereditary determinants, and it’s only with the greatest effort that we can free ourselves from their embrace.” These “historical and hereditary determinants” are recursive factors that become the basis for one’s identity—or else we spend our lives attempting to exorcise them. It is evident in this collection that this terrain of childhood has been carried into the adult psyche, and that history has compelled us.

  In obvious ways, and across cultures, this is a collection about fathers. Throughout modern psychology, the father is often a source of myth, but the father who has seen war, who has performed acts of violence, heroism, or survival, is in many ways inaccessible, a mystery to us, and he may enact the power dynamics of war or military ritual in the household. One may spend one’s life in pursuit of him, or engulfed in the empathetic attempt at understanding, but may only find a labyrinth of the past or an inscrutable distance of power. This distance becomes a motif in the collection: Tom Bissell asks, “Can God create a boulder so large that even he cannot move it? Similarly, could a child ever feel bigger than his parents? I was not thinking of size. Rather, could a child feel existentially bigger?” Teresa Mei Chuc writes of meeting her father: “He was like an Egyptian cat: skinny, foraging, stern. He was impenetrable. He didn’t smile; he didn’t run up to swoop me into his arms. He was a stranger coming to live with us.” David Ellis writes: “He was a bit of a stranger to me, one that I tried to unstrange by snooping through his stuff.” Here we begin to recognize that the process of discovering is an attempt at making the father real—perhaps to see the past with clarity, or attempt to understand as adults what was confusing as children.

  While the father is an expected character in the narrative of war, perhaps more importantly, both implicitly and explicitly, the experiences of women during wartime are portrayed. The poet Nguyen Phan Que Mai, born in a village in North Vietnam in 1973 and raised in the Mekong Delta in the South of Vietnam, conveys the experience of women who work the earth with their hands, and who know the deep emotional suffering of war: pregnant women who survive bombings, or women who call out for their dead children or husbands. Through the rendering of these lyrical narratives and through a careful reconstruction of her own lineage, Nguyen Phan Que Mai creates a portrait of woman that is both fractured and resilient. Of her own mother, who gave birth during wartime, she writes: “To protect me from those storms, my mother spread her wings.” This Vietnamese poet’s verse resonates with Vietnamese American poet Cathy Linh Che, whose poem “Split” relays the story of her mother, as a young woman in a village in Vietnam, and her encounter with US Marines who want a cutting of her hair: “With scissor-fingers, / they snip the air, / repeat cut, // point at their helmets / and then at her hair.” Che asks, “What does she say / to her mother / to make her so afraid?” After encountering the troops, Che’s mother is sent away from her nameless village never to return. These writers convey only a glimpse at the experience of their mothers during war, but one begins to see a reality often overlooked.

  In many ways, as revealed through their detailed renderings, these authors have performed great acts of listening, but also acts of bearing witness to the weight of silence in the household. This is true of war in the family dynamic—where one learns whether to ask, or not to ask, especially in a culture that had moralized the role of the soldier. Tom Bissell writes: “There were two types of Vietnam veterans: those who talked about the war and those who did not talk about it.” Many of the US veterans were among a small percentage of Americans who actually deployed to war. This feeling of otherness was only magnified by the pressures of reintegrating into a hostile public from a war deemed unethical. Yet, despite the silence often carried into the household, the language of war was indoctrinated. As Ada Limón writes in “Listen”: “When you live with a veteran, the language of war becomes a natural thing.” Perhaps for Vietnamese Americans the relationship to silence is even more complicated; perhaps there are two simultaneous realities—one that exists within the Vietnamese American community, and another when engaging in the larger society. In the former there is a sense of shared history, where the refugees share an understanding of what the other has survived; perhaps this constructs a mutual understanding, even in the unsaid. Yet, integration poses another barrier, one that often carries the stigma of silence. In “The Good Immigrant Student,” Bich Minh Nguyen conveys this struggle as she relays her experience as a Vietnamese student in a Midwestern public school; she writes, “I was nearly silent, deadly shy, and wholly obedient. My greatest fear was being called on, or in any way standing out more than I already did in the class that was, except for me and one black student, dough-white.”

  In Inheriting the War, accounts of witness are told from the descendant’s point of view; they deliver another kind of war story—one that asks us to discard the romanticized view of war, and to seek a more truthful, long-term depiction—one of brutality, suffering, and even forgiveness. Here, the history of family converges with history itself, and these authors, who have internalized these histories, whose lives have been shaped by conflict and survival, ask for a listener. In doing so, they subvert the dehumanized depictions of the other.

  The psychology of otherness is intended to keep us from seeing one another as human. In a chapter titled “Images of the Enemy” in his 1959 philosophical memoir The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, published during the Vietnam War, professor and World War II veteran J. Glenn Gray conveys that the use of the definite article “the” constructs a psychological war tactic: “not ‘an’ enemy or ‘our’ enemy,” but ‘the’ enemy” (134). He suggests that the construct implies a “unified, concrete universal” (134). He writes, “By designating him with the definite article, it is made to appear that he is single and his reality consists in hostility to us. Thus do the moral absolutisms of warfare develop through the medium of language, and, all unconsciously, we surrender reason to the emotional contagion of the communal” (134). This generalization strips the individual of personhood, autonomy, and humanity. The language of the military dehumanizes. It objectifies. It desecrates personhood and poses the greatest danger to that which makes us human.

  But, in these pages, the concept of “the enemy” is extended, not merely in reference to “the other side” as enemy, but to their children, often called “children of the enemy.” In his
astounding work of scholarship Children of the Enemy: Oral Histories of Vietnamese Amerasians and Their Mothers, Steven DeBonis depicts the realities of Amerasians in the United States, in the refugee camps, and in Vietnam. In his introduction he conveys the complex reality these individuals endure. He writes, “In most of these Amerasians, the genes of their fathers predominated; there was little of Vietnam in their looks. Freckle-faced girls, lanky young black men, blonds, red heads” (3). He illustrates this stigma: “Outsiders in the land of their birth, fatherless children in a culture where identity flows from the father, Amerasians were generally considered fair game for abuse. The taunts My lai and con lai, suffered by almost all Amerasians, and My den by those of black descent, carry stronger negative connotations then their approximate English equivalents: ‘Amerasian,’ ‘half-breed,’ and ‘black Amerasian’ ” (5). Black Amerasians, he reports, feel that they’ve faced more severe abuse than whites: he quotes the mother of one black Amerasian girl: “Vietnamese say, ‘You go back to America, you dirty American, go back.’ They say like that many times to my daughter, ’cause she is black. My son is white, not so many problems’ ” (5). DeBonis reports on abandoned or orphaned children and others abused and ostracized by their parents; Amerasians who suffer bullying, depression, or who perform self-mutilation: “Cigarette burns and razor slashes on the arms and legs, and occasionally the torso are common among both males and females. Also not unusual among men is the lopping off of a part of a digit, generally the pinky, occasionally the index finger” (6). Such accounts of cruelty and brutality, delivered in the most intimate form as oral histories, recur throughout his study.

  Inheriting the War begins with a poem by Quan Barry titled “child of the enemy” that explores this complex identity. Barry writes: “the floating world carved its shame / on the dark meat of my face.” Barry’s work is a meditation on the convergence of identity one individual embodies right here in the United States. And later in the collection, in “Motherland,” Amy Phan delivers the story of Huan, a black Amerasian man rescued during Operation Baby Lift, who returns to his homeland. Often through innuendo, gesture, or the character’s reflection, Phan’s work illustrates the difficult racial experience of the character in both cultures. These works, and others, present the experience of identity as a result of a culture that has adopted this brutal mindset.