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On the outdoor veranda of our hotel, a 9 year-old Vietnamese girl wanted desperately to unload her supply of Tiger Balm into our hands. She was playful and cute, calling us diarrhea and then laughing girlishly into her balled up fists. The slang she had picked up on the balconies of these hotels added flare to her sales routine, but in the last week we had seen a hundred other charming children trying to pawn their commodities. On this hot summer evening near the Gulf of Tonkin, our beers provided all the entertainment we needed. When our friend finally understood we weren’t buying she turned on us. She looked at me with eyes I couldn’t recognize as belonging to a child and she said, “Don’t you remember the war? Go back to America, fuck head!” Of course I didn’t remember the war. And neither did she. In terms of the conflict this child and I were essentially the same age. Her question bothered me though because I knew someone who could have answered her differently. My father fought as an engineer in the 9th Infantry Division, patrolling south of Saigon near the sedimentary waters of the Mekong Delta. I’ve seen two purple hearts hanging from a plaque in the hallway for years, but I don’t know how he got them. I wonder sometimes if he’s forgotten himself. Once, when I was 12, he showed me a stack of black and white stills in which he stood with his lanky frame against a backdrop of rice patties. That’s the only proof I have that he’s ever been there.

Peter

These mental exercises were the casualties of being the son of a veteran in Vietnam. In one way or another, however, thoughts like these have followed me around my entire life. I’ve always wanted more information about the year he spent at war than he’s willing to share, and because of that I walk a thin line with my father and Vietnam. He nearly disowned me the day I told him I was leaving to see the country for myself. 
For a month he begged me not to go. I packed my bags regardless, telling myself to ignore his pleas, because I thought I was doing my old man a favor. Secretly he wanted to come with me, I thought, as if the reunion would be therapeutic. Looking back I realize what a sanctimonious SOB that makes me. Thinking I know what’s good for the man who taught me everything is a feat no worse than treason, and before I go any further, I need to apologize for that.

I hop scotched across the country like it was a playground. In Saigon I bought a bootlegged copy of The Quiet American and I read from the shabby pages in the electrified air of the tourist quarter. I toured the Mekong, snapping pictures of floating villages. I ate coconut candy. I twisted along Highway 1 in a sardine can and spotted giant jellyfish from the bow of a pirate ship in Halong Bay. A newly tailored suit in Hoi An put me back $20 and a deal like that made me smile like an alley cat. 

 For every boy who’s never been to war, the rules of engagement seem like a game, and I wished at every turn that my father were there with me to explain the books, the pictures, and the roadways upon which the country was beginning to take shape. Every time I passed through a village I wanted to ask him if he had been there. With every war relic, every tunnel, and each overturned tank I wanted to ask: Did you ever see that, pop? 
I selfishly recalled the images I had seen of my father in old pictures, wanting them to be real again for my own purposes of hero worship. I would have paid to hear his stories—those I never received but always felt I deserved—retold in the setting where they were conceived.
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We drank heavily the following evening. After a few beers, we hired a group of men to carry us from the hotel in Hoi An to a local bar. The trip was twenty minutes of adrenaline as we clung to the back seat of a motorcycle through the pitted blackness of rural Vietnam. No city, just black. Faster. Faster into the darkness almost completely unknown, it seemed, even to our drivers. 

The bar stood alone. Only the low-lying landscape and drainage ditch across the street from the building could be seen in the shadows. The drivers took our money and left. My friends made their way into bar, and I, still reeling from beer, took a seat on the bank of the ditch. Looking up, I could see every star in the universe. The insects hummed. The blackness in front of me unfolded into more blackness. I could hear an animal move in the distance and it took every ounce of courage to remain in place, not to move, to continue breathing. 
Then, in the wild darkness, I had visions of my corpse. 

He had asked me not to go, and for an instant, with a nightmare running through my head, I wished to God that I hadn’t. Go back to America, fuck head made all the sense in the world as I felt the silent approach of time and memory come inching across the same landscape my father may have seen more than 30 years ago. On this stretch of land, I had violated every secret horror he had ever bore witness to; I had unearthed a father’s battlefield, one that should have remained hidden from his children. All along he had been protecting me from this moment of fear when I would, perhaps a little ashamedly, realize that there were no weapons aimed at me, that the animal moving in the brush was neither friend nor enemy, that I was safe enough and free enough to cross the street and join my friends at the bar.

All the protection in the world couldn’t save me from what I didn’t want to know: there are two Vietnams. The contrast is vivid. One is harmless enough and beautiful, peppered with tailored suits and literature—that’s mine. The other is forever dangerous and inexplicably foreboding, riddled with violence I won’t even pretend to understand—that belongs to my father and every other vet who ever stepped foot in the country. Knowing this, I left the ditch behind and returned to my friends with feelings of guilt and privileged humility. I didn’t make it to the door without crying.

The following is Peter's first article for the magazine:

Feeling Safe In Cambodia ~ Talking To The Nerves

To contact Peter Click Here
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