Inheriting the War

 

By David K. Shipler 

            Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army 50 years ago today, yet “wars never end,” says Nguyen Phan Que Mai, an eloquent novelist and poet who has kept alive the beauty and suffering of her native Vietnam.

She was speaking recently in Washington, DC, alongside the photographer Peter Steinhauer, who was captivated in childhood by pictures of Vietnam taken by his father, a US Navy oral surgeon stationed in Danang during the war. As an adult, the son traveled there, then lived there, and has made part of his profession the celebration in images of the country’s landscapes and architecture. Marc Knapper, the current US ambassador to Vietnam, is the son of a Vietnam War veteran.

And so it goes, through multiple generations. Vietnam does not release you easily. For Vietnamese who fled into exile, the natural pull of the homeland’s culture remains. For many Americans, too: Vietnam is still embedded in their lives, whether they went to fight the war or to write about it, to profit from it, to study it, or to oppose it by giving benevolent aid.

I am among those who have carried Vietnam with me all these years. My new novel, The Interpreter, is inspired by a Vietnamese translator who gave me essential help when I reported for The New York Times. It is dedicated “to those who interpret their countries’ wars for audiences who watch from safety.” Interpreters, “fixers,” are behind every story you read or hear or see.

Like many interpreters, my semi-fictional character flies above the political categories imposed by wars. He translates words and interprets his culture. “I give the words true meaning,” he says. As North Vietnamese tanks approach Saigon, he must choose whether to leave for safety in the US or stay at risk in his beloved country—a choice made every day by people in upheavals across the globe.

My late wife, Debby, used to say that Vietnam was her favorite of our overseas assignments. Her creation of English-language classes for children slated for adoption by American families brought her warm friendships with Vietnamese teachers—and with the kids themselves. We came to love a nine-year-old boy whose mother wanted him adopted so he could get an education in America, as she told the adoption agency. More than a decade later, when I was asked to give a commencement address at Middlebury College, I got to hand Jonathan Shipler his diploma. It was a high point in my life.

I know an aging ex-Marine in Maine whom I’ve never seen without his Vietnam Vet baseball cap. At Bangor airport, veterans used to form welcoming lines for troops coming home from Iraq. They were not going to let those young Americans be vilified.

But some others who fought in Vietnam won’t talk about it. They won’t revive the trauma, drawing a curtain of silence across the pain and often through their families. Such an account came to me some years ago in a stunning vignette composed by a student in a writing workship I taught in Nebraska. Every Fourth of July, his father and a close buddy, both veterans of the war, gathered for a barbecue under a big American flag. The father wouldn’t tell his son about the war, but he gained solace from his friend’s company.

Then his friend committed suicide. After that, the student’s father didn’t fly the flag or do the July 4 barbecue anymore.

War wounds fester or heal in various ways. The late Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war in Hanoi for five and a half years, ultimately pressed for diplomatic relations with Communist Vietnam and visited the “Hanoi Hilton” where he’d been held. President Donald Trump, who avoided military service because of purported bone spurs in his heels, ridiculed McCain when he was alive and this week ordered senior American diplomats to boycott all ceremonies in Vietnam marking the anniversary of the war’s end. History, too, either heals or festers.

The war was still politically toxic nearly three decades after the North Vietnamese victory, when Republican-funded ads making false accusations damaged the 2004 presidential candidacy of Senator John Kerry. a Navy swiftboat captain who became a forceful critic of the war. Claims that he showed poor leadership and did not deserve the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Hearts he was awarded were apparently motivated by ex-servicemen resentful of his antiwar activity.

For his part, Kerry campaigned more on his service than his doubts. He forfeited the chance to lead Americans into a serious discussion about the trap of misguided warfare, although the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were ongoing at the time. The lessons of the Vietnam debacle had evidently expired, and Kerry did little to teach them again. 

Correspondents who covered Vietnam share a continuing bond. We tell war stories over lunches and dinners, and the war still reverberates into the professional work of some. My brother-in-law, Arnold R. Isaacs of the Baltimore Sun, who was flown out as Saigon was falling, has written two of the finest books on the subject: Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia, and Vietnam Shadows: The War, its Ghosts, and its Legacy. He debunks the MIA/POW myth that Americans are still secretly held prisoner in Vietnam, another legacy of the American trauma.

During the war and for some time later, the voices we heard were almost entirely American. And they spoke mostly about Americans, not Vietnamese. Only gradually did Vietnamese voices break through in the United States to tell the Vietnamese stories of the war: Le Ly Hayslip in When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, a book made into a film by Oliver Stone. Nguyen Phan Que Mai, who wrote The Mountains Sing and Dust Child, and is out with a new book of poetry, The Color of Peace. Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won a Pulitzer for The Sympathizer. And others, at last.

I needed somehow to write about the Vietnamese-American interaction between interpreter and correspondent, that critical place where the world looks from afar. Important parts of my Vietnam story remained mostly untold until now. I was there only a year and a half, a young, green reporter with no dreams of writing a book. But as I discovered, writing for a newspaper leaves a lot unsaid, even when the newspaper is as great as The Times. And fiction can reach deep truths that are beyond the rigorous precision of nonfiction.

So, I reached as far as I could in The Interpreter, whose hero’s work I described this way: “He spoke to them gleefully at first, then soberly, delicately, almost tearfully, seducing his proud and pummeled countrymen to give up their inner torments to the Americans.”