Two stories of how Vietnam came home to the family

For some of the children of Vietnam vets, the war is not yet over.

from the March 13, 2007 edition

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" 'Look at these hills,' my father said, pointing at the slopes and rises all around us. 'How we fought and scratched for them.'

"Some brief, terrible recognition in his voice and eyes – some distance closed too quickly, some unexpectedly recovered past – spooked me deeply. My father was softly shaking his head."

Having studied the war in great detail (which he analyzes quite convincingly in "The Father of All Things"), the younger man finally asks his father:

" 'Dad, forgive me, but how the hell did you guys manage to lose? You had every imaginable advantage.'

" 'Funny,' my father said, looking away. 'I was just thinking the same thing about that myself. What can I tell you?.... We had a lot of advantages, that's certainly true. But this wasn't our country. We were all a long way from home.' "

His father's response, Tom Bissell writes, was "perhaps the most human sentiment I had every heard my father utter about the war."

My Lai happened two years after Lt. Bissell's tour. But the half dozen pages or so devoted to that horror – what happened that day and one combat vet's agonizing visit to the site – are excruciatingly told and revealing of both men.

"I walked toward the ditch," the younger Bissell writes, "less sad than emotionally excavated .... my father rubbed his chest through his shirt and said, 'My heart hurts.'

"I imagined him – I imagined myself – here ... during those first moments that saw the day's terrible momentum gather, the evil freedom of the trigger availing itself upon the minds of friends and comrades, the various ecstasies of murder, and I did not like the range of possibilities that I saw."

Will such realizations, clear or cloudy, come to some child of an Iraq war veteran 20 or 30 years hence? Very likely.

"Part of me is shaped forever by the years my father spent in Vietnam, and how those years shaped him, and then, all our family," Zoeann Murphy writes. "It's not easy for me to make sense of this."

Books like hers and Bissell's are a very good start.

• Staff writer Brad Knickerbocker is a Vietnam veteran.

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