The Father of All Things | Tom Bissell | Talks at Google

Thanks for coming to our authors at Google Reading. Before I introduce our reader, I want to just give a quick plug to the MoMA page for upcoming events and videos of past readings. That's Go Authors. And we have another reading coming up on Tuesday. Bob Woodruff and his wife. We're going to be here to read, so please check that out and like to see you at more of these It's a great pleasure for me to introduce Tom Bissell. I first met Tom several years ago when he was invited to the Bennington Writing Seminars to speak and read. And like just about everyone else who heard him that day, I followed his work ever since with a combination of admiration and awe at his both his productivity and creativity. Tom's first book was the 2003 Chasing the Sea, on account of the ecological catastrophe resulting from the near disappearance of the Aral Sea in the republics of the former Soviet Union. It was an amazing debut, winning high praise from the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and prompting reviewers to write things like Bissell proves at the age of 29, he is a maestro of the genre. And can Chasing the Sea truly be Bissell's first book? Tom's second book, published just two years later, was the collection of short stories God Lives in St. Petersburg and was also, for the most part, set in and around that troubled region. The most important thing to know about it is that it's even better than his first, proving him to be as gifted in fiction as he is in journalism and memoir. As one reviewer wrote, Bissell's lucid narration of men and women in difficult, faraway places reads like the work of resurrected Hemingway, although I should add that technically that reviewer was me. But pretty much everyone loved these stories. Writing in the New York Times, Pankaj Mishra explained that Tom reveals himself to be not only a subtle craftsman, but a mordant observer of a new generation lost in a complex and dangerous world. I was excited to hear a couple years ago that Tom was going to Vietnam, as I knew he shared my fascination with that country and its unique place, perhaps now not quite so unique in our own nation's history. The result of his time there is a book that, as Joe Klein wrote again in the New York Times just this month, brings a luminous prose style and perhaps more importantly, a clear, fresh eye to events that many of us have allowed to slip into the infuriatingly painful past. Tom has been living recently in Rome on a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Along with all his prolific writing and travel, Tom continues to teach at Bennington as a member of the core faculty and in creative nonfiction. He's also a pretty decent banjo player. Please join me in welcoming Tom to Google.

Thank you, Dan, for that very fine introduction. It's very nice to get an introduction from someone who is an excellent writer himself. Thank you all for coming out and sacrificing this glorious, glorious afternoon to a reading. I appreciate that very much. I'm coming to you something like the Spinal Tap of literature. Five of the last seven flights I've been on on this tour have been canceled or delayed so long that I missed the thing that I was going to the city to actually do in the first place. And then there was the sinus infection that sent me to a Virginia emergency room a few days ago. That was fun. And then last night I read in a bar in Seattle, a bar that happened to be playing the NCAA tournament, which was playing on a large screen directly behind me, which was okay, because it allowed me to pretend that the occasional bursts of applause and gasps were actually in response to my pros rather than the game that everyone was watching. And I'm just really happy to be here. I'm happy to see all of you, and I'm glad that this isn't an air base and that I'm not with, like, a puppet show, like, you know, or that I don't spontaneously combust to continue the Spinal Tap references. But I'm going to read a bit from my book, which is a book about my father's and my trip to Vietnam. My dad was a Marine in 1965 and 1966. And this really needs virtually no setup other than I want to point out something that Linda and I were talking about on the way here, which the part I'm going to read is going to sound a lot like an Iraq Vietnam comparison fest. And I want to just assure everyone here that this section that I'm about to read I wrote In November of 2003, long before any of these echoes would have seemed to have a lot of resonance to them. So the book sort of came into these echoes rather than set out to make any. So my father and I are in a place called Quin Yang, which is where he stepped off the amphibious vehicle and set foot in Vietnam for the first time. We're looking for the spot where he did this, and the night before, we've been drinking. The following morning, as my father and I made our way down a devastatingly bright beach, which felt like nothing so much as having been swallowed by a postcard, I found myself comparing my constitution to his. My father imbibed a fraction as much as he used to, but he still possessed the cast iron disposition every alcoholic needs if he or she is looking to make a life of it. I looked and smelled as though I had spent the night in a halfway house urinal, whereas he looked and smelled as though he had just slept 15 hours in some enchanted flower bed. I was reminded of the various times I had, while growing up, seen my father triumphantly insensate after a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, wearing only underwear and a winter jacket, off to do some 3am snow shoveling. Mere hours later he would be healthfully pink and whistling as he knotted his tie before work. Constitutionally, I was not this man's spawn. Two shots of vodka gave me a protuberant headache, four beers annihilated the preceding 24 hours, and five glasses of red wine landed me in intensive care. I pictured my father's alcohol processing unit as some deafening barn sized combine. My own alcohol processing unit, which was evidently powered by a gerbil, could not keep up with it or him. And here on the beach he patted my back as I dry heaved into some bushes. We were looking for the exact spot where my father had come ashore with a thousand other Marines in April 1965, one month after the deployment in Da Nang of the first US Marines sent to Vietnam explicitly as combat troops. The Marines who landed before my father were greeted by cheering Vietnamese, and several young women stepped forth to hang wreaths of flowers around their sunburned necks. By this point, the war was universally viewed as being lost, governmental chaos reigned in Saigon, and General William Westmoreland, the head of the US Military effort in Vietnam, no longer had any trust that the South Vietnamese could defeat the Viet Cong. His Marines would no longer stand impotent guard beside airports and radio towers and hospitals. Now they would hunt down and kill Viet Cong insurgents. Many expected a quick victory, as it was assumed that the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese could not withstand America's superior firepower. We are going to stomp them to death, one US Major general said at the time. A Gallup poll conducted shortly after the Marines landed in Vietnam revealed that the percentage of Americans who believed that the war would end with a Communist victory or with the United States pulling out was precisely zero. President Johnson, worried that most Americans would see the offensive uses of Marines as a reckless escalation of the conflict, instructed Robert McNamara to downplay the deployment, with the press going so far as to suggest that McNamara claimed that the Marines had been Dispatched at the request of the South Vietnamese government. An overt lie, Secretary of State Dean Rusk assured reporters that the troops would only be guarding Da Nang's airbase and some missile batteries. After a three week moratorium on combat operations. That promise went out the window until a low level bureaucrat accidentally spilled the beans a few weeks later that US forces in Vietnam were taking part in offensive killing operations. Few were aware of the Marines real purpose in Vietnam. General Westmoreland had been certain that the injection of US troops would reverse South Vietnam's forced fortunes. Introducing 60,000 men under the mainland of Southeast Asia, he believed would so change the balance of power that the communist choices would be limited to one, whether they should sue for peace as quickly as possible or two, take on the US in a major war. Many in the US military failed to share this view, arguing that driving the Viet Cong out of South Vietnam would require decades and as many as a million men. President Johnson's decision to go ahead with the far limited deployment, the far more limited deployment that many believed would fail, nearly caused one member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Harold Johnson, to resign. General Johnson later called his decision not to resign the worst most immoral decision I've ever made. It would not be until June 1965, four months after the Marines arrived, that anyone in the Johnson administration would admit to, to the American people that a major war had indeed begun. It took us 15 minutes worth of beach combing to find the site of my father's landing. A thin stand of coastline palm trees, miraculously unaltered since 1965, hardened his memory into place. We stood looking out on the. Excuse me. We stood looking out on the sea in a black grid of shadows cast by the cranes and scaffolds of a resort being built a few dozen yards away. I began asking him questions, but very gently. He asked if I might not give him a moment. Instantly I realized my error. He could not talk right now and stared out at the ocean in both confusion and recognition. This is where the man I knew as my father was born. It was as though he were looking upon himself through a bloody veil of memory. They told us this was going to be a combat landing, he said after a while to expect the very worst. The ships we were on flooded themselves and the landing craft and amphibious vehicles swam off. We came ashore heavily armed, cocked, locked, ready to go to war. We had tanks and trunks, trucks and ontos. Ontos lightly armored vehicles mounted with six recoilless rifles. They shot all kinds of ammunition, armor piercing, anti personnel, Willie Peter. Which is white phosphorus, one of the worst things you could get hit with. When the shell explodes, it sprays white phosphorus and if you put water on it, it flares right up. It's oxygen fed and you have to take mud and smother it. Lovely weapon. I'd read a description of white phosphorus once. How it exploded with a fulsome elegance, wreathing its target in intense and billowing white smoke, throwing out glowing red comets, trailing brilliant white fumes. It burned through skin, through bone, through steel, through anything. I asked, didn't the Geneva Convention forbid the use of white phosphorus against troops? It was only supposed to be used against equipment, right? He did not even look at me. Uh huh. Right. How old were all. How old were you with all this at your disposal? I was 23 years old, a platoon leader. Later I became company commander and I had all the infantry and supply people under me. I was probably one of the youngest company commanders in Vietnam, if not the youngest of this. I could tell he was still proud. So anyway, we hit the beaches and appearing over the gunwales of the landing craft, and all of a sudden I hear people swearing at me in English. We landed smack in the middle of a swimming hole for the United States Army. God damn it, Marines. What the fuck are you doing here? Quite an arrival. It gets worse on we went down the beach road, I guess, over there, which I was told to do, and we went into the city of Quinon and promptly came to a dead end. I missed the turn or the map was out of date. The whole 2nd Marine Battalion could have been destroyed, but there was no hostility. Everyone was cheering us. It was glorious. That's my biggest frustration. When I talk to people who weren't here, they'll say nobody really wanted us to come to Vietnam. Well, they sure as hell welcomed us with open arms. When did it start to go bad? He pointed to the hills beyond Quin Yan. An arcadia of rough, beautiful triangles of fuzzy jade and sharp spurs of exposed white rock. A few sparkling white waterfalls pouring down the hills. Faces. Those look beautiful, but they're meaner than a son of a bitch to walk up and down. The VC was there, as we found out. It only took two days before we were fired on. The first six people we killed were all women, armed and shooting at us. Mind you, he had never told me this before. Dad. My God. What was that? How did you. What was it like? It was like about what you'd expect it to be like. I threw up. No one joins the Marines to shoot women. But he went on. Those women killed a few of us, too. We were so inexperienced, we were shooting ourselves at first. One guy tragically fell asleep on watch and turned himself around in his foxhole. He woke up, saw people, opened fire, killed the rest of his fire team. So what happened to him? He went crazy. They shipped him off to Japan. It's the last we ever heard of him. Were the parents of the guys who got killed told it really happened? I don't know. I doubt it. They were probably told their sons died bravely in combat. Who would want to know their kid died asleep in a hole? I left my father's side and walked toward the incoming surf, stepping around a beached jellyfish pulsatingly expiring in the sand, and tried to imagine myself, at 23 years of age, having to deal with the reality of my friends killing my friends. Having to face that struck me both intellectually and emotionally as an extraterrestrial impossibility. My first quasi experience with war was a terrifying game of college paintball, during which, at my first glimpse of the opposing army cresting a nearby hill, I climbed out of my two man foxhole and sprinted back toward the rear line as fast as I could, leaving behind my best friend Mike, who has since reminded me many times that I shouted sorry over my shoulder as I ran. My second, more substantial encounter with war occurred while I attempted to cover the US invasion of Afghanistan in December 2001. I was in Afghanistan for five days, and while almost nothing happened to me, the psychic vice that closed around my mind did not loosen when I stepped back across the Afghan Uzbek border. Instead, it grew worse. For months I talked endlessly of my five days of war. For months, when I closed my eyes, I saw the abandoned Soviet tanks and endless gray sands of northern Afghanistan's Dashti Laili desert. What, then, did real war do to a person? What had it done to my father, and what might it have done to me? Would I have been one of those dead American boys they found sometimes in Vietnam's jungles, whose M16 barrels were respectfully kicked out from beneath their chin so no one would know they had shot themselves in the middle of battle? Would I have been one of the shitbirds I had read about in so many combat memoirs? A coward? A fuck up? Had I been drafted, I might well have opted for a steady diet of poutine and Montreal croissants. Or would I have been an anti war activist? Could I really see myself among the young souls who tore down the Justice Department's American flag in 1969 and replaced it with the colors of the Viet Cong? Or would I, like Dick Cheney, have simply gone to my college classes and regarded with tepid annoyance the gallery of traders between me and the admin building? Many Americans still believe that anti war activists were traitors. There is no doubt that those who prosecuted the war were effective in frustrating its enactment. One US Admiral admitted after the war that the reaction of noisy radical groups was considered all the time, and it served to inhibit and restrain us. North Vietnam's Vo Nguyen Giap, the commanding general of North Vietnamese forces, called anti war activists a valuable mark of sympathy. The Postmaster General of the United states announced in 1969 that anti war protestors were, in effect, killing American boys. What is wartime dissent? And is it still dissent when it is demonstrably bolstering enemy spirits? I did not think it was fair to cover anti war activity with any blanket of treason. But the matter was surely more complicated than most wanted to admit. Though not so complicated as to allow, literally or figuratively spitting on American soldiers to achieve the status of coherent political expression. Today, one often hears that one can oppose a given war but still support the troops. Support, it will be explained, means getting the troops home as quickly as possible. But the nature of soldiering creates men and women who expect, and some ways even want to fight and to kill. How then does one oppose a war but support those fighting it? I was not sure one could. To oppose a war that soldiers were fighting meant that one opposed the soldiers. It had to. It was also beside the point. War is its own country and creates its own citizens. Many soldiers, when interviewed by military psychologists, have admitted that the bond that formed between themselves and their fellow soldiers during combat was the most intense that they had ever felt, more vivid than the bond between them and their parents, their siblings, their children, even their spouses. These men, who were they really? Sometimes it seemed as though there were almost as many myths and counter myths about the men who fought in Vietnam as there were men who fought in Vietnam. The so called Vietnam Generation numbered about 27 million men. Of them, 3.1 million, about 12% served in Vietnam and roughly 800,000 about 3% saw combat. While there was Vietnam and Francis Fitzgerald's withering words. Truly, a white man's war being fought by blacks, a rich man's war being fought by the poor, an old man's war being fought by the young. The average soldier's age In Vietnam was 19. But Fitzgerald's other assertions are belied by the facts. Black soldiers, for instance, made up 12.5% of all combat deaths during the war, a full percentage point less than their share of the U.S. population at the time. Early in the war, however, black soldiers deaths were massively out of proportion, 25% in 1965 and 1966, almost twice their general population. 73% of those killed in Vietnam were volunteers. 30% were Catholic, despite Catholics accounting for 23% of the US population. And contrary to popular belief, there was no great disparity of death by income level, though again, the war's earlier years saw stark economic disparity amongst those killed. The devastating after effects of the war upon its veterans were also routinely cited. But unemployment rates for veterans after the war were actually lower than those of non veterans and their rate of suicide was no different from that of the rest of the populace. However, studies done on veterans that take into account the amount and intensity of experience combat have suggested that those who saw an unusual amount of action have extremely high percentages of divorce, joblessness, alcoholism and health problems. On all of these discrepancies, two things seem clear. The first is that the first is that the view Vietnam veterans are subject to endless suffering is too indulgent. The second is that the view that Vietnam veterans are by and large well adjusted is too selective. A survey is not a mind and a statistic is not reality. It seems clear that the more highly educated officers and servicemen who saw service in Vietnam have coped well, psychologically speaking, whereas the less educated boys from the ghettos and farms of America, teenagers who believe that God was good, just and American, were far less mentally prepared to deal with the confusions and ethical bonfires of guerrilla war in a country they knew nothing about. The trauma for them was far stranger. The questions unanswerable. Where did that leave my father? Here on the beach that had chopped his life in two with a son who loved him but could not understand him and whom he could not understand. So we move on to a place called Tuy Fok, where my father was wounded and I'm just going to jump in here. I asked him about the kind of fighting that the Viet Cong forced him to think about. The VC would not close with us. They didn't have the firepower, and we knew that if they made a stand against us, they would lose ass hat and fixtures. So they'd pick on our patrols, ambush us. He was agitated now and stared with cool determination out his window. And you were mostly in charge of running convoys, so we were the prime targets I could call to provide transportation and logistics for missions. It was Boring, boring, boring. And then it was terrifying. And you never knew what was going to happen, if the operation was going to be totally eventful, which most of them were, or if it was going to turn into a nightmare as a few became. So you were fired on a lot? Mm. Dad, come on. Mortars, he said finally. They love to mortar us. And they'd bracket a road so we change routes all the time, take different roads, bracketing. They'd shoot until they knew exactly where their shells would go. Then they'd click their mortar launchers up or down, right or left. That's called bracketing. Bracketed means you're in deep shit. How many firefights were you in? A dozen? 20. They would last anywhere from 10 seconds to two hours. Then the VC would break off and run. We lost a tremendous amount of people trying to save our wounded and retrieve our bodies. And they knew it. They knew we would. I'm sensing some anxiety here. You're sweating.

Really.

He touched his temple. A lagoon of perspiration. He quickly, quickly, like he quickly wiped his fingers on his shirt. Well, maybe a little. How do you feel about the Viet Cong now? He looked at his camera as he turned it over in his hands. We were all soldiers. They suffered terribly, you know, compared to us. Brave people committed to their country. We sort of lost that. I'm sorry, I said, surprising myself. Yeah, he said, me too. So we find the place where my father was wounded, and I'd always believed that he was shot. And then this heroic black Marine saved my father's life by dragging him into a ditch. This is the story that I had grown up with believing. And we go to the place where my father was wounded and he tells the story. And we were on a search and destroy mission, My father explained. We entered Teufeld in a convoy. After 20 minutes of driving, we found the road was cut by a huge earthen mound. The VC obviously knew we were coming, so we were all very suspicious. We fanned out. I was at the head of the convoy and called up the engineers. They were going to blow up the mound and rebuild the road so we can continue. About 15 men came up and I turned around to talk, to talk to the gunnery sergeant from the lead infantry platoon, and the mound exploded. Inside the dirt, they packed a bunch of steel and shrapnel. The only reason I'm here is that I turned around to speak to the gunnery sergeant. I remember saying, gunny, I'll go back and get some more equipment. You know, shovels, stuff like that. The bomb caught Gunny in the face and I went flying through the air. Then I tried to get up, couldn't. There were people lying all over the place. I think 15 were wounded. Gunny was the only guy killed. My platoon sergeant hauled me into a ditch and they field dressed me and jammed me full of morphine and then flew in the choppers. I was very fucked up. In total shock. I had 200 separate wounds. They counted them. My left arm caught the brunt of the blast. I thought they were gonna have to take it off. So that ended my war for a while. Wait a minute, I said. I thought you were shot. No, I never got shot, which is fine by me. But that's not the story you told me. I don't think I ever told you that story. Then why do I remember you being shot and a black marine dragging you to safety? I have no idea. Was the sergeant who pulled you into the ditch black? I don't think so. I honestly don't remember. My father's sleeve was rolled up and I was now looking at his left arm. Incredibly, I had never before noticed the scoring of cross hatched scar tissue running up and down his forearm or. Or how thin his left arm seemed compared with his right. I had, however, many times noticed the bright pink nickel sized scars on his bicep and shoulder blade, the small lightning bolt on his neck. When I was young I used to stare at these obvious wounds and sometimes even touch them. My tiny fingers freshly alive to their rubbery difference in texture. But I had to admit now that I did not actually remember my father ever telling me that he was shot or that a black marine had saved his life. I remember telling that story myself, but I do not remember being told that story. At some point, the story simply appears in my mind. Why did I create this story? Because it made my father heroic. In the emergency of growing up, we all need heroes. But the father I grew up with was no hero to me. Not then. He was too wounded in the head, too endlessly and terribly sad. Too funny, too explosive. Too confusing. Heroes are uncomplicated. This makes them do that. The active heroism of my imaginary black Marine made a passive hero of my father. They huddled together alongside a road in the Vietnam of my mind, shrouded in nitroglycerin, the cordite of bravery. The story made sense of the senseless, but war does not make sense. War senselessly wounded everyone right down the line. A body bag fitted more than just its intended corpse. Take the 58,000American soldiers lost in Vietnam and multiply by 4, 5, 6. And only then does one begin to realize the damage this war had done. Project outward from the millions of slain Vietnamese and see for the first time an entire continent of loss. War, when necessary, was unspeakable. When unnecessary, it was unforgivable. It was not an occasion for heroism. It was an occasion only for survival and death. To regard war in any other way only guaranteed its appearance. I studied my father, who was still smoking and peering around. Suddenly he appeared very old. He did not look bad. He was, in fact, in better physical shape than I, a topic of persistent agony for me and ceaseless delight for him. But he was older looking than I had ever seen him before. His neck had begun to give up and sag. His eyes were bigger and more yellowy. The long, wolfish hair at the base of his throat was gray. I was 29, six years older than my father when he was wounded. Could I really know the young man who had gone flying through the air, ripped apart by a booby trap? Could I even know this man, still flying and in some ways still ripped apart? Ultimately, our lives are only partially ours. Crucial pieces of our personal mythologies are shed at every turn. The parts of our lives that change most are those that intrude with mythic vividness into the lives of those we love. Our parents, our children, our brothers and sisters. As these stories overlap, they change, but we have no voice as to how or why. One by one our stories are dragged away from us, pulled into the ditches of shared human memory. They are saved, but they are changed. One day my father will be gone. But for the parts of him I remember and the stories he has told me, that man and those stories will be different from what my brother will remember or what my stepmother or mother will remember. What else did I not know? How much else about him had I gotten wrong? What have I not asked in looking at him? I wanted him never to go. Why, I wondered, did I have to lose him? I want him always to be here. There's too much left for us to talk about. A lone Vietnamese man shoelessly wandered over to greet us. As he and my father shook hands and, with our translator's assistance, chatted, I realized that this man was around my father's age. It was, in fact, not at all beyond possibility that this man had personally wired the booby trap that nearly killed my father. But his solar friendliness was not feigned, and beneath its insistent emotional heat I could see my father's discomfort soften and wilt. He leaned in, ear first, to listen to the translation, and within moments, this man and my father were laughing over something together. I listened to my father and his new friend talk respectfully around the small matter of having tried to kill each other as young men. Yes, my father had been to Vietnam before. No, the Vietnamese man had not always lived in Tei Phok. Their conversation slid into a respectful silence, and they nodded and looked each other over with a smile. The man suddenly asked my father what had brought him to Teu Fok, since it was so far away from anything of note. For a long time, my father thought about how to answer, Looking up at the low gray clouds, a few small trapezoids of blue showing through. To our translator, he finally said, tell him. Tell him that a very long time ago, I got hurt here. Thank you. So I jumped ahead a bit in the last part of it. And the place we were. We'd been looking for it, and it was mostly flooded out. And so I lost some of the. Some of the spookiness of going there with my father and watching him, like, gradually realize that this place where he'd almost been blown up, was closing in on him. And we sort of. The road had been flooded out, so we kind of stopped about 100 yards away from it. And even then, I could tell that the one time on our trip, the only one time, which was an amazingly fun trip, and we. In which he was delighted to be there, the only time. But going to this place was the only time where I actually felt my father become visibly rattled about it. So in the interest of brevity, I sort of cut that part out. But I think it's an interesting detail to learn that even 40 years on, that the place could still retain that kind of power for him. So, anyway, I would love to answer any questions. I think we have about 17 minutes worth of talking to do. If anyone has any questions, I would be happy to talk about them. Yes, The question is the extent to which my father was willing to have his son exploit his personal life for the putative benefit of thousands of people he's never met. And the answer is, it was gonna start out as a magazine piece that I was going to write. And then we went there, and I was there for maybe two days. And I thought, this is actually gonna be a book. It just stirred up a lot of emotion for me and for him. And at the time, there wasn't really a lot written by, like, the adult children of this war's warriors, the sons and daughters of the men and women who fought and suffered in Vietnam as Young people themselves.

And I thought, well, this would be.

A really interesting book. And unfortunately, someone beat me to the punch last year and published a book about it. But I think this is pretty much the second one. But I kind of convinced my dad that he was a kind of emblematic figure. And I wanted to write about him in the context of the war and me as his son. And he was kind of dubious about the whole prospect. But I think he knew it was something I wanted to at least try. And when I wrote the magazine piece, he was very pleased with it. I will say that if you do get a chance to look at the book, there's some stuff in here that's pretty hard on him, very hard for him to read. But he read the manuscript over before I turned it into my publisher. And he and I went through it page by page and worked on all the stuff that I didn't want anything in here that was going to harm him, you know, permanently, that was going to leave a scar. But I also convinced him that it wasn't going to be affecting if it wasn't honest. And for it to be honest, there's going to be stuff in it that was going to be hard for both of us to sort of deal with. All that said, he really is very happy with the book. I think he finds it profoundly weird that he's on the COVID That's my dad. I think he finds it very weird that he's being discussed in some of the reviews as, like, this character that I have created. But I think he's really delighted. And to say that he loves the book would not quite be accurate, But I think he knows that it's basically a son's love letter to his father. So I hope it comes across that way. And I should also add that the book came out a couple weeks ago, and my father just happened to find himself coincidentally vacationing in the Caribbean throughout all this, because I don't think he wants any. A lot of interview stuff I've been asked to do. Everyone's like, can you get your dad on the show, too? And he's not having none of it. So he's like, look, it's your thing, you do it. I already answered enough of your questions anyway. Yes, the question is what I'm working on now. And Dan had mentioned that I live in Rome. And before I found out I was going to be living in Rome, I decided I was going to write a travel book about the tombs of the 12 apostles, which are in really strange places. Five of them are in Rome, though, five of the 12. Well, actually, each apostle has about five tombs. Someone has a finger here or a leg there or an arm there, but each apostle sort of has, like, a shrine or a reliquary. And I thought a really cool travel book would be to go to all of them and just write about what kind of reliquary is it? Where is it? Why do they think this person is there? What is this person's tradition in, you know, the larger Christian story? And because there's almost no information on any of the apostles in the New Testament itself, all the stories we know about them sort of take take place outside the parameters of the New Testament. And it's really crazy. They do really weird stuff, like they raise fish from the dead in some of these stories. And there's one where this panther comes running up to Philip and Bartholomew and says, hello, I am a Christian. Please accept me. And they give him communion. And it's like, what you really appreciate, the sense of discernment with which those who put the New Testament together were working with. But. And then you go to the tombs themselves, and they're really different. Like, there's one in Rome, the tomb of Philip and James the Lesser is basically like a homeless shelter. And it's really strange. And then there's the tomb of Andrew in Patras, Greece is. Just. Has a constant stream of visitors kissing the thing that his head is in. And so each apostle has a really unique kind of cult attached to him. This is what I'm working on right now. And it's. This is a book, too, that the only book like this is out there. There's some, like, kind of fundamentalist Christian tracts about this. But if I have anywhere near the bad luck as I had with this one, I'm sure someone will publish a version of this, like, a few months before I'm done. But we'll see anyway. Yeah, please don't. Yes. Besides going to Vietnam, did you do any other research for this book or just all through that? I did a ton of research. If you look in the back, there's a bibliography of about 130 books. And I had read a lot of books by American soldiers, their memoirs and stuff, but I'd read almost nothing about the Vietnamese side of things. And a lot of the things that I found most interesting about the war was all the stuff on their side of things. For instance, Ho Chi Minh loved volleyball. I bet you didn't know that. He was a huge volleyball fan. And he was a fascinating man for any number of Other reasons, he was a founding member of the French Communist Party. He was probably the only person we know of who, during the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, was actually had a show trial and was not executed after it for reasons that have remained unclear. And when I started reading about Ho Chi Minh and about the story of Vietnamese communism, the story of French colonialism, you really can't understand what the American side of that war was about without this huge. These decades of lead up into it, you know, And a lot of American portrayals of the war in Vietnam are just horrifyingly naked of any kind of historical underpinnings of it. You know, it just becomes soldiers bayonetting wicker baskets, looking for weapons and shaking nonsense, talking villagers and. And you get no sense that there's this. Obviously there's. I mean, you get no sense that there's this hugely complicated other side of the story. And so most of my research was just about the South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong and the stories of what the war like, what the war was like from their perspective. And the last part of. Of the book. There's three parts to this book. The first part is sort of an account of the last month of the. Of the war. The second part is account of my father's and my trip. And the third part is just a series of monologues by what I call the children of the war. People whose parents fought. And some of them are American, some of them were from South Vietnam, some are from North Vietnam, and some are. Some have parents who were Viet Cong, which is to say communist insurgents in South Vietnam. And hearing these young people just tell their story, I thought that was. Those stories are really interesting because they're not stories that we get a lot of in this country, and we don't think a lot about them, you know, particularly when we talk about the war. And I think anytime you can be remembered that this war that, you know, screwed up our country in any number of ways actually killed about three and a half million Vietnamese themselves and affected families there in ways that, you know, makes. Makes what happened to us look like a love bite, I think is a useful thing to remember. So the research I did on it, I did a lot of research, and I hope the book sort of gives every side of the war a fair shake. We have eight minutes left of. Or we could just play pool. Yes, Dan, I'd love to tell that story. I went back to cover the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon with a Friend of mine, Morgan. Morgan's father was a draft dodger who Gerald Ford granted draft dodgers a sort of conditional pardon. And like, you had to do community service and then you could be pardoned. Morgan's father came back from Montreal and said, actually, I'm not doing your community service. He was brought to court by the Illinois justice system. Morgan's father defended himself, anyone. And that victory became the basis of President Carter's no strings attached amnesty for all draft dodgers. So Morgan's father was a draft dodger. I was the son of a Marine, and Morgan and I thought, wouldn't it be great if we went and covered the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon? That'd be wonderful. And we were both really interested in a man named Wen Cao ke, who's not a name that a lot of people know of today, but he was kind of the most charismatic of the South Vietnamese political figures. He was kind of crazy, but he was also really smart. And he was a pilot, and he hated communists, even though he was from North Vietnam originally. And he had this beautiful silver jet and this incredibly hot young wife. And he wore a purple flight suit with a. With a pink, like, cravat, I guess. And he always carried, like, a pearl handled Colt pistol. He's like, he was just this amazing figure in the story of the war. Well, only three years ago has he been allowed back in Vietnam. And this is a very big deal for the Vietnamese that the former elite of the defeated South Vietnamese are now being allowed a place in Communist Vietnam today. This is a big deal. And we decided, oh, we'll interview Nguyen Khao Kee during the anniversary of South Vietnam's collapse. And Morgan and I met Key in a Sheraton hotel and we interviewed him for four hours. And. And he was just clearly delighted that he's largely forgotten by history. He was these two American kids who were just like, oh, wow, tell us more. He was telling stories about the war, and he's referring to Linden. The people he knew on a first name basis were really amazing. You were talking to a man who had lived through some pretty extraordinary history. And then we had lunch with Key, and then we walked back to our hotel, not realizing we'd picked up government tales because Kee is still watched by the Vietnamese secret police. Morgan. Here's where the story gets really funny. Morgan's other life. He's an art critic, and he's interested in other things, but he's an art critic, and he knew a lot of Vietnamese artists who also happen to be government dissidents. And he had been going around interviewing all of them for a completely unrelated project. And meanwhile, in Communist Party headquarters, the authorities are like, first these guys interview Wen Kaoqi. Now they're seeing all these government dissident artists. What are they doing? What's going on? It's the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Arrest them. So one day, Morgan was out walking, and they just arrested him and threw him out of the country. And it was the first time a journalist had been expelled from Vietnam in, like, five years. And with Morgan was our photographer, who was taking pictures. And they arrested him and threw him out. But before they threw him out, they interviewed them, and they were looking at the footage and the notes that we take. And I think they realized pretty quickly that this was actually just a huge misunderstanding. But they couldn't, like, not throw them out after they'd arrested them. They let me stay, but they kind of menaced me at every turn for the rest of the trip. This is my last trip to Vietnam, and we wrote a story about it, which ended with me unable to get the clearance I needed to actually cover the parade of the anniversary of the fall of Saigon. And so I did what any rational person would do, which was go on an ecstasy bender with some friends, and wound up wandering around the edge of the parade, lost, out of my mind, totally confused. My friends were gone. I didn't know anyone, what was anything was going on. And wandering around the 30th anniversary of the reunification or the fall of Saigon, I realized to myself, I'm confused. I'm lost. I don't know what I'm doing. Everything that I planned on doing here has completely fallen apart. And I thought to myself, this is actually sort of a perfect analogy for the American experience in Vietnam, you know? And so that was how the piece that we wrote sort of turned out. But that was my last trip there, and whether or not I'll ever be able to go back, I don't know. I haven't tempted fates and tried to get a visa yet. But I do know the day that because the Vietnamese are great pirators, that if I ever go to Vietnam and I see this baby being sold on the streets in a cheaply photocopied edition, I'm going to be really, really thrilled to see that. I'm going to be really happy. So I have to go back at some point soon. But anyway, I think we have time for one more question, or not. Okay. Well, I really thank you all for your patience. Sitting here. I really appreciate you coming. Thank. You.