Inheriting the War Read online

  Indeed, objectification through language as conceptual warfare extends beyond the military and far beyond the war-zone; in fact, such language is used to devalue the other in everyday interaction. t.k. lê conveys this in “Part of Memory Is Forgetting” when, at happy hour, white co-workers talk about the Vietnamese American writer as the “Viet Cong”: “I listened to her laugh echo in the bar. It was as if something about my face was a riddle, a joke, and Viet Cong was the punchline.” It’s important to reflect here. This is not happening 40 years ago. This is now.

  Perhaps this reduction of the other—the veteran at home, the refugee, and the cultures abroad—is a by-product of the cleansing of history—revisions and erasures. This erasure of the other as human is an attempt at justifying brutality. Names of battle and military lingo persevere while the personal is written out. Critic John Berger explains this revision as one that constructs distance in his essay “Hiroshima” when he writes that human stories have been torn out of the pages of history. He argues, “Of course, the facts are there in textbooks. It may even be that the children learn the dates. But what these facts mean . . . has now been torn out. It has been a systematic, slow and thorough process of suppression and elimination” (The Sense of Sight 291).

  If an official history silences, literature cultivates a space where those voices torn out of the pages of history survive to reinstate themselves. In A Journey with Two Maps, poet Eavan Boland writes “the rift between the past and history [is] real; but it [is] not simple”; she continues, “In those shadows, in the past, I was well aware that injustices and griefs had happened without any hope of the saving grace of elegy or expression—those things which an official history can count on. Silence [is] a condition of the past” (13). I once asked her to clarify what she means by this “rift.” She said that the past and history are not the same thing. History has been edited into an official document of the winners—it says little of the pasts of everyday people. Poetry is one way of telling those untold stories.

  The language of war turns the other into an object—the language of literature humanizes. Through the narratives of others we can more clearly see the world, and in them, we see ourselves. These narratives subvert the clinical accounts delivered in history books. They complicate the glorification of war delivered by Hollywood as near propaganda. These narratives ask more than to listen to the politician, the historian, or even the soldier, but to the soldier’s family. They ask us not only to listen to those who are on “our” side of history, but to a communion of voices that together create a multidimensional history, whether through the vivid depiction of landscape or psyche. As Grace Paley writes: “Now the dead and the living are telling us about the war. No matter whose side they’re on, they tell the truth” (Paley, Just As I Thought, “Everybody Is Telling the Truth” 73).

  In Tom Bissell’s book The Father of All Things, he includes several oral histories that he conducted. One of them is an encounter with a Vietnamese woman who tells him:

  Mostly I remember bombs falling, airplanes coming. I remember always moving. My father was political. He was a farmer, then he was a VC. My mother was not political. My brother was not political. We were poor. We were chased out of our home many times. Sometimes by the VC when my father was gone, sometimes by the bombs.

  I remember as a little girl not believing I would survive. I remember thinking, “Tomorrow, I will die.” Can you imagine? Later when I went to the United States to study, many professors asked me, “Why do you want to come here? Don’t you hate Americans?” I said, “Behind the soldiers, behind the governments, there are always hearts, families, memories, childhoods, pasts.” (355–356)

  She says that she started to read short stories by American authors about the war, but that she could not recognize her own experience in those accounts: “That was not my war. My war was my mother crying, my brother crying, always moving” (356).

  Many authors in this collection, across cultural borders, were also living during the war. Their accounts here sometimes convey the experience of war as a child, or reflect on the immediacy of war in their families. These accounts, both Western and Vietnamese, transcend politics. With time having passed now, we can begin to listen to those most vulnerable—others like us, everyday citizens—with understanding.

  And now more than ever it is necessary to listen to these refugee narratives. The stories of those whose families fled on boats to arrive in refugee camps can provide a truthful gaze into the reality of refugees today fleeing war-torn nations and other countries emblazoned in conflict. In his essay “The Stories They Carried,” Andrew Lam delivers insight. The title is an allusion to the acclaimed novel The Things They Carried, written by Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien, except Lam directs the reader’s focus not on the soldiers, but rather on the Vietnamese refugees. In 1991, 16 years after the end of the war, Lam spent six months living and working as a Vietnamese interpreter in Whitehead, a refugee detention center in Hong Kong known for “riots and gang fights and mass protests and a handful of self-immolations.” Many of these detainees were rejected for political asylum and were to be sent back to Vietnam. He writes, “There were eleven people, mostly women, who disemboweled themselves in protest of being forced back.” During his time there he reported on the gruesome accounts of these Vietnamese refugees, including children born in the camp who have never known life outside of the barbed and chicken-wire fences. He lets the people tell their own accounts, through his translation, to deliver to the reader a detailed reality of the circumstances. Through Lam’s work, and through many other writers here who convey their own experience as refugees in Western culture, in the aftermath of a war 50 years past now, we may have some clarity on the continuing refugee crises in the face of war.

  Through each deeply personal individual narrative, and through a rendering of the imagination, these writers restore empathy to those who suffer the psychological and everyday erosions of war. Yet it is through the collective body of work that one discovers a many-sided truth in order to, as Berger urges, “reinsert those events . . . back into living consciousness” (The Sense of Sight 287). But the work of the collective is not merely to leave an imprint of experience. Rather, sociological imagination calls for an act of empathy; listening, imagining, researching, and excavating history—personal and cultural—becomes the work of transformation. I’ve often said that telling implies a listener, and that, perhaps, being heard is the first step toward healing. In this way, the collection of voices here aims to reveal that the individuals, both soldier and civilian, women and children, all equal from all sides, suffer. And more importantly, we must recover—as individuals, as families, as a nation, and as human beings who share in this history.

  In The Other, Ryszard Kapuściński teaches us: “just as a bad childhood leaves its mark on the whole of a person’s later life, so a bad historical memory has an effect on later relations between societies.” In this light, there is work to be done. During the war effort, the United States sprayed 5.5 million acres of land with Agent Orange. The toxin, which sickened Western veterans as well as Vietnamese and civilians with lifelong, life-threatening, or fatal illnesses and cancers, continues to pollute the landscape. In 2008, the United States proposed a program to begin restoring the land in Da Nang, but the New York Times reported, “Many here have not hesitated to call the American program too little—it addresses only the one site—and very late.” Vietnamese-born artist Binh Danh, who teaches at Stanford University, addresses this environmental inheritance in his photographic series Immortality: The Remnants of the Vietnam and American War. He makes use of photosynthesis in his photographic process by recording war images onto tropical leaves using chlorophyll and light. In an artist statement he writes: “The images of war are part of the leaves, and live inside and outside of them. The leaves express the continuum of war. They contain the residue of the Vietnam War: bombs, blood, sweat, tears, and metals. The dead have been incorporated into the landscape of Vietnam during the cycl
es of birth, life, and death; through the recycling and transformation of materials, and the creation of new materials. As matter is neither created nor destroyed, but only transformed, the remnants of the Vietnam and American War live on forever in the Vietnamese landscape.” In this moment, with awareness that human interference has damaged the environment, almost irreparably, it is our responsibility to do all we can to restore the land for the health of the people and the planet.

  Further, one must realize that to this day there are casualties of the Vietnam American War. In September 2016, brothers Done (10 years old) and Pone (9 years old) were killed when they “struck an unexploded device while digging for crickets in Nongbua village . . . some 250 km southeast of Lao capital Vientiane,” according to the Vientiane Times. In Laos, the United States dropped more than 2 million tons of ordnance. According to the National Regulatory Authority, there have been 20,000 victims of the war in Laos alone since the war ended in 1975—and almost 300 casualties annually for the last decade, many of whom are children. And in Vietnam and Cambodia there are claims that, since the end of the war, more than 100,000 civilians have been killed by unexploded ordnance.

  While the United States has been working to make reparations, and in fact is now engaged in trade and tourism with Vietnam, US veterans have been invited back—but the Vietnamese Diaspora in many ways still experiences severance and dislocation. And those refugee families, many of whom identify as American, still feel divided from their motherland. On March 10, 2015, at Poets House in New York City, the poet and peace activist Nguyen Phan Que Mai read with her translator, Vietnam veteran and Pulitzer Prize–nominated poet Bruce Weigl. During a discussion, she spoke of mending the relationship between the United States and Vietnam. As she welcomed Americans to visit her country, Vietnamese American poet Paul Tran addressed another, more complicated question. What of the relationship between the Vietnamese Diaspora and Vietnam? Tran’s question highlights the anxiety of the former generation in regards to their homeland—an anxiety that is shared by this generation. Yet those descendants of the former South Vietnam are now traveling, many for the first time, to their parents’ homeland. This discussion publicly recognizing the rift between Vietnam and her Diaspora is an important one, and perhaps the beginning of a real initiative toward reconciliation.

  The work collected here, while confronting histories and eulogizing pasts, is an attempt at transformation. The poems and narratives depict only a sliver of the larger experience. In regards to history, the truth is manifold, and through this collective of voices these writers direct us both backwards and forwards: the aftermath of war crosses borders of generation and culture. In many ways this is new territory, as writers of this generation are still emerging; thus, there are voices not yet represented here—missing are works by descendants of women veterans and nurses; there are few writers living in Vietnam represented in these pages; and there are many other writers of this community who are not included within the confines of this collection. So let this be a continuum. Let this conversation extend beyond these pages, beyond even literature, into action, policy, and acts of empathetic listening.

  QUAN BARRY is the author of the novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born as well as four poetry books published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (Asylum, Controvertibles, Water Puppets, and Loose Strife). Barry is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

  FROM “CHILD OF THE ENEMY”

  I’ve seen thousands of Amerasians, and I have two Amerasian [children] of my own. Amerasians are willful and stubborn. They have serious identity problems. They have no discipline. Down the street at the Floating Hotel you’ll find Amerasian prostitutes plying their mother’s trade. I think there’s a racial thing here, something genetic.

  —An American ex-soldier as quoted in Vietnamerica

  I. NIGHT TERROR

  It started when I was four.

  Vacation. Door Country. Wisconsin.

  The alewives rippling on the rocks

  like a flock of birds, the sudden knowledge

  growing like a toll. Then

  I couldn’t have articulated it, but I knew.

  It wasn’t the beached fish that frightened me.

  It was the ones that got away

  under the wreck of water. The ones that survived

  by fleeing, kin left rotting on the shore.

  II. TWENTY YEARS LATER

  Someone who had been there

  (and now incidentally is serving

  a natural life sentence)

  told you it wasn’t all

  about killing. Don’t ever believe

  you weren’t conceived in love.

  You take his word for it

  like an imago splitting the shell,

  each wet wing a voice

  purged and steeling.

  III. CHILD OF THE ENEMY

  a.

  I was born with a twelfth hole. Instantly

  the floating world carved its shame

  on the dark meat of my face. A love child, child of perfidy, allegiance split like a door.

  I was born a traitor in the month of Cancer, the white phosphorus

  pungent, knowing.

  b.

  1973. The rice winnows out like shrapnel. Before it’s over

  there are fifty thousand new hostilities, each birthed face inimical

  as our fathers stealing home.

  c.

  Think of the places women dilate. Beds. Barns. Saigon streets.

  No good Samaritan comes forward and only the moon like a platoon

  treacherously approaching, its extended hand like a speculum, the better

  to illuminate, disgrace.

  d.

  Or more importantly

  the places women leave. An unsuspecting caretaker. The bacterial streets.

  Or

  perhaps the unspeakable pitch into burlap

  and water. A gulf off the South China Sea where another sinking form

  is anyone’s guess.

  e.

  That time Tet fell in the year of the snake. As in reptilian. As in

  no turning back. As in when I became

  a child of containment. As in how like a monetary policy

  I was loosed to an existence feral as a raised bayonet. As in

  what the serpent might say: knowledge for knowledge’s sake

  is both industrial and complex.

  f.

  At birth

  I was swaddled

  in a blanket. Pink

  wool. Threadbare.

  Like everything else

  moth-eaten.

  Man-made.

  g.

  Before the last vertical bird lifted like a gurney out of April

  and twenty years clotted to a tumor brilliant as a stuck fish

  and the dreams began in which you saw yourself as the killer

  of trees, before the army finally said it was something in the water

  and orange came to be the cloak of mourning, tell me soldier:

  who taught you to love like a man, you with nowhere to go

  but tacitly free?

  TOM BISSELL was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. After graduating from Michigan State University, he worked briefly as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan and then as a book editor in New York City. He is the author of Chasing the Sea; God Lives in St. Petersburg, winner of the Rome Prize; The Father of All Things, a hybrid work of history and memoir about his father and the Vietnam War and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Kiriyama Prize; and Extra Lives. He has lived in Michigan, Uzbekistan, New York, Saigon, Rome, Las Vegas, Estonia, and currently resides in Portland, Oregon, and teaches fiction writing at Portland State University.

  FROM THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS

  My father, it was your sad image,

  so often come, that urged me to these thresholds.

  My ships are moored on the Tyrrhenian.

  O father, let me hold
your right hand fast,

  do not withdraw from my embrace.

  —Virgil, The Aeneid

  I

  While sitting next to my father on the All Nippon Airways flight from Tokyo to Ho Chi Minh City, I finally grasped what had been bothering me. It was not the odorlessness of the processed cabin air, or the tidally sustained roar of the engines, or even the handful of tranquilizers I had gobbled. What bothered me was the increasingly unsettling sensation of simply being beside my father. Somehow he made me feel physically diminished. Perhaps fathers could not help but make their sons feel smaller. What was a father if not the one man who would always wield power over his son? One did not have to love (or even like) one’s father to sense this essential inequality. I loved my father very much, but I was suddenly a little too reminded of him, which is to say, a little afraid.

  I studied the hairy hands that held open the Vietnam guidebook I had bought for him: thick fingers, big knuckles, huge glossy nails. I then regarded my father’s head. It seemed something out of a circus tent. I could not even look at it all at once. His round, wet eyes, Kilimanjaran nose, lost-cavern nostrils, and geological chin dimple belonged to separate facial ecosystems. The westernmost edge of the United States’ mainland was eleven hours behind us, and his striking physiognomy occurred to me now because during the previous leg of our trip I had been seated one row ahead of my father, not next to him. I had also tired of the book I had brought aboard and was actively searching for something to think about, since, while flying, if I was not vigilant, my thoughts tended toward the macabre, such as, for example, the imminence of my own death.