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. And yet there I was face-to-face with a child who still
believed I was her enemy. In this part of the world 30 years ago, I suppose
we would have been. 30 years ago, if my father met her father, being called
a fuck head was the least of anyone’s worries.
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. One afternoon as we left an M-16 firing rage, that feeling
overwhelmed me. From the back of a bus I saw an old woman quietly bent
over in a field of green that stretched over the earth like canvas. I envisioned
a younger version of my dad, the man from the pictures, crouched down among
the grass, helmet straps undone, his radio antenna shooting skyward and
then bending again in a lazy arch toward the soil. I turned to the friend
next to me and told him what I saw. As it had countless times already,
the conversation led to war and then to my father. Soon the two Americans
next to us joined in, making my veteran the centerpiece of the moment.
Satisfied that we should travel so intelligently, with a backdrop of history
guiding us through the pitted roads and verdant landscape, I considered
how my old man would sit if he were bouncing along this road and what he’d
do if he had felt the thud in his chest as we had when the M-16 exploded
on the firing range. What would he have felt if he had heard all those
cameras go click-click-click when the lady with the pointed hat bent down
to cultivate her rice? 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:
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.
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