Tom Bissell's new book, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam, recounts his journey through Vietnam with his veteran father. A hybrid of memoir and history, the book interrogates the war in both the past and the present, painting a picture that is at once global and deeply personal in scale. At the same time, it presents us with Bissell's self-interrogation as he examines the impact of the war upon his family, himself, and his relationship with his father.

When I asked for this assignment, I expected a book that would speak to me as another child of a veteran; what I found instead was a complex, multilayered interrogation of what it means to fight a war, and it both challenged and ultimately changed me. The book is in itself a journey, as was this interview, conducted via emails bouncing between California, Italy (Bissell won the Rome Prize in 2006 for his previous book, God Lives in St. Petersburg), Germany, and various airports therein, all in two weeks in early March.

Jennifer Uhlich: I thought we could begin with the overall structure of the book. You speak about this in the preface, but even so I think some readers will be surprised at the structure and pacing of your narrative as well as the amount of history you include. It is certainly helpful, and necessary, for those of us whose understanding of Vietnam is limited to one relative's account and a two-week history unit in high school. But it also feels careful, that you took great care in structuring the book. Do you think that's an accurate assessment, and could you speak a little about the process of shaping the narrative?

Tom Bissell: I had a few high school history classes, of course, and not one of them ever got beyond the Korean War. On at least two occasions the last day of class involved watching Platoon, which does not exactly provide the most grounded basis in understanding the war in Vietnam. Yes, my book's structure is very strange, and I'd love to say I had some grand plan or lightning bolt of inspiration, but the long first part—half novella about my parents, half a history of South Vietnam's last month—began in my mind as a brief, ten- to fifteen-page prologue. Then I wrote the first paragraph, and sort of surprised myself when I wrote the first few lines in the second person to my father. I still have no idea why I did that. I remember distinctly sitting back, going "Huh," and then just carrying on with it to see what happened. I wound up writing a 230-page opening "prologue," which was later cut down to about 140 manuscript pages. It was all instinctive, and all an accident. A wonderful accident. I have to think I was inspired by the late, great Ryszard Kapuscinski, whose books are similarly, weirdly structured. He often writes books in three or four parts, and these parts will have no formal connection to one another but are completely connected in any number of subterranean ways. You get several mini-books in one. That's what I was trying to do. Finally, though, the structure solved my most pressing concern before I began the book: How do I go about communicating this tremendous amount of historical information in a way that is not going to send the reader reaching for hemlock? (Although a couple of reviewers have tut-tutted the history sections.)

JU: It's interesting that you've had some tut-tutting about the history. I was wondering about that. Certainly the book's structure violates some basic presumptions about how a memoir should read. But as much as I was sometimes startled by it, I never doubted that the history had to be there, and not just to overcome any gaps in a reader’s knowledge. Who gets to speak about Vietnam, much less write about it, seems to be an issue that is endlessly contested and very emotional for everyone concerned. Who has the right? It's a question that recurs throughout this book, and the history goes some way in addressing that concern. Were there any parts of the book that you were doubtful about including? Moments in the trip that you just put aside, for one reason or another? I suppose ultimately I'm just very interested in how you negotiated your own role. That it troubled you at times is very clear in the book, but how you arrived at the decision to go forward and publish this book is not always clear.

TB: Oh, I cut a lot out of the book. Some of the stuff my folks asked me to cut, some of the stuff my editor thought was too plodding, and some of the stuff I cut myself. Everything that's in there now I don't have many second thoughts about. It's all been solidly and thoughtfully justified in my mind, at least. The manuscript was over 1,000 pages long at one point. It would up being 700 pages, which is still pretty long, especially for a book that, when I started out, I was worried about not having enough information for. But the history issue: I really like to write about history. I'm interested in history from a passionate amateur's perspective, I try to do my homework, and I try to write about it in a way that gives a fair shake to the inevitable and various controversies that arise when one is trying to wrestle with any contentious event. With Vietnam you're kind of stuck: Everyone thinks they know something about it, but in actual fact most people know astonishingly little about it—even people who fought there. The American experience in the war only takes up about 15 to 25 percent of what's worth knowing about the war, and for me that proved to be some of the least interesting information. William Duiker's Ho Chi Minh biography and his book, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, are both extremely fascinating, precisely because of all the incredible inner turmoil it details among the Vietnamese—even in the Communist Party—from the 1930s to when the war with America actually began. And you can't begin to understand the war unless you have some grounding in this stuff—the French colonialism, Vietnam's relationship to China, Ho Chi Minh himself, the 1950s. The war really doesn't make sense without having some idea of these matters: it's just Platoon-esque scenes of gibberish-talking villagers hiding weapons in their rice baskets and angry American soldiers wondering why everyone hates them. The Vietnamese understood us better than we understood them. And sometimes I wonder if that's not why the war turned out in the way that it did.

JU: Perhaps then that's what so difficult for some to reconcile about your book—that the picture you paint is vast and incredibly complex, and then as a reader one has to try to pull all of that information into these immediate scenes with your father. It feels almost claustrophobic in passages, to watch him through your eyes and yet be aware of this huge framework you have built up around these moments. It's a very delicate balance that you've created. At times I felt like I was on the verge of losing your father's individual experience under this crush of history and just at that moment you would come back to him; it's only been through rereading that I've been able to appreciate how the history helps to contextualize aspects of your father's interactions that might otherwise have slipped past me.

I know that the book began as a magazine assignment and you subsequently expanded it. Having agreed to participate in the magazine assignment, was your father comfortable with your further development of the project? Has he read the book?

TB: My dad. My dad, my dad. I'll give you the answer I've been giving people: While it would not be wholly accurate to say he loves the book, he told me he was deeply moved by it and proud of it, and he's happy for me. He can't read it objectively because it's about him. Because it's about him, and has some things in it that I imagine are painful for him to read, he can't—and shouldn't—be able to read it as he would something else I've written. That said, we've never had a cross word about it. Not once. Not even when we were going through it page by page together, making sure nothing got in there he was overly uncomfortable with. I gave him 100 percent veto power. Yes, I successfully argued to keep a few bits I thought were too important to cut, but this was exceedingly rare. So on the one hand he has no right to complain, but on the other I basically took his life and exploited it for the putative benefit of thousands of strangers. (That's my other standard line.) That I have a father who was willing to go through this with me, and who supported me, and who has been a total prince throughout the process, I thank my lucky stars every day. Someone just wrote to me, "Your father really is the very soul of Upper Midwestern stoicism and fatalism," and he is, but he's also a funny, lovely guy in so many ways. I hope that comes across: his decency. A lot of the reviews have stressed the distance between us, and how we try and fail to close it, but I have to say, this is news to my dad and me. I've never felt closer to him, in fact. I spent every day for two and a half years thinking about him. Of course, I'm not sure it's as intense on his side of things. At least, one day, if I ever have a family, I can give my daughters or sons this book when they ask about their grandfather. And that's a great thing. Aside from any literary or commercial success the book might or might not have, it's at least a part of our family legacy.

JU: Which I suppose is another way in which this book is actually several mini-books: history and memoir, nonfiction and fiction (in your recreating scenes you were not present for, which makes for a very powerful opening), public literature and private legacy. I haven't yet read the reviews myself, but it seems as if you have challenged a lot of expectations and preconceptions. I don't think I ever expected some sort of cathartic scene or dramatic closure—life doesn't work like that, and this is a book very grounded in life. Do you think, though, that your perception of your father changed over the course of your journey? As you traveled together, was there anything about him (besides the story about how he was wounded in action) that truly startled you?

TB: Actually, no—and I think that may, indeed, have thrown me a little. My father was very reluctant to open up during the trip, and not because he's not an open, emotional fellow—he is, and very affectionate—but mostly because I think he carries that Marine germ that holds it's unseemly to complain about the lot that he in effect volunteered for, and saw his good friends die for. The one time he seemed on the verge of losing it was on our very first day there, which I write about in the beggars scene in Hue. He actually shed tears, the only tears of the entire trip. He was solid the rest of the trip, and constantly complaining about all the questions I asked him. One funny thing is this: usually when I interview someone, I wind up throwing out about 90 percent of what I've recorded. This time was the exact opposite. I think I probably used about 90 percent of what we recorded.

JU: Given your father's reticence, then, I'm not sure if you can answer this or not (or if you want to). But the history you recount in the book, as you yourself have stated, attempts to be a full history, if not a complete one: it contains voices from all sides, and you often point out instances of blindness on all sides, an inability or an unwillingness to see a larger, more inclusive picture. From the conversations you recount in the book, your father has some decidedly different perspectives on the war, as well as politics and culture in general. Do you think that your father's opinions about the war have altered as a result of your experience? Not just from the journey—he does discuss the war with you during your travels—but also from reading the history you have compiled. Do you think that affected his perspective in any way?

TB: No. That's about as good an answer I have to this one. My dad is very much a pox-on-all-their-houses-type American when it comes to politics. But he supports the military. Not because he thinks America is always right, but because I think his coming of age was shaped around a war that he believes was abandoned, a war he believes he never received the wider cultural respect or approval for having served in. My joke is that the United States could invade the sun and my father would defend it. He's been a stubborn defender of the Iraq War for a long time now, which is un-fucking-believable to me. I went to Iraq, as you know, in the summer of 2005, and I wrote a good amount of the resultant Harper's piece while back home in Michigan visiting. One night we were at dinner and my dad was saying it's not nearly as bad as the media says it is. I was sitting there, choking on my milk. I said, "Dad, I'm the media, and I was just there. And it's a fucking disaster!" But he wasn't talking about me, but other, them, else. He respects my opinions and I respect his. I know where he's coming from. But I can't be there with him. He doesn't have a malicious, talk-radio bone in his body, by the way, which helps. But the very haunting thing is his friendship with Ernest Medina, of My Lai massacre fame. You see what I write about Medina in the book, which I hope is devastating. I asked my father what he thought about that part, about this man he considers himself friendly with. He said, "I accept the validity of what you wrote," and that was it. He didn't want to talk about it. Makes my blood run cold a little, still.

JU: Have you and your father revisited the topic of My Lai since that time, or of his friendship with Medina? It is certainly one of the moments where the reader feels most keenly your struggle to understand, and mixed feelings about trying to understand, running headlong into your father's reticence; it was, for me, one of the most affecting moments in the book. There is also a great deal of anger in the scene. Perhaps you could speak to that a little as well, your own wellsprings of anger that you write about, not only when visiting My Lai (it feels very strange to write "visiting My Lai") but in other scenes in the book, for instance near the end when you are visiting Cu Chi .

TB: We haven't. I asked him what he thought about what I wrote, and he said he accepted its validity. I think, when pressed, he would still adhere to the "You weren't there, you'll never understand" defense, which as I say in the book drives me nuts. As for the anger . . . well, I don't want to claim that going to those places was personally painful, because that is just an attempt to leech away someone else's genuine, literal pain and take it as your figurative, grandstanding own. But I did have a moment, which I write about, where I was infuriated by my visit to My Lai: first by the knowledge that none of the men responsible for this were ever really brought to justice, and second by looking at the visitors' guest book, which was filled with anti-American sentiment from all around the globe. As though this were a uniquely American tragedy. But then I find in the book that there's an idiot American writing about how the Viet Cong did bad things too. In my book I say I just signed my name and didn't write anything in My Lai's guest book, but that's not true. I did write something. This is what I wrote: "Let's hope someday events such as My Lai are an occasion for something more than rhetoric and something less than relativism."

As for Cu Chi, I think my dad's and my tempers were about a millimeter long by that point. We'd been on the road for many days, and we were both fried. But Cu Chi is actually kind of a really weird, and even strangely fun, place. Highly recommended. One day when I was living in Vietnam I got some good financial news and went there and fired off $300 in ammunition to celebrate. My Vietnamese friend Q---- and I did this. Then later we went to his house—he lives between Cu Chi and Saigon—and played Conflict: Vietnam on his Playstation 2 for a couple hours. I remember thinking, "Well, this is really rather odd, isn't it?"

JU: I was amazed by the guest book and the entries you quoted. Well, amazed and not amazed. It's the kind of thing I would have tried to read from start to finish had I been there. And certainly there are many points of view represented in this scene: yours, those expressed in the guest book, the woman who compares it to Auschwitz, your father and his connection to Medina. In your opinion, what is an appropriate response from someone visiting My Lai? What would you like to see come out of My Lai—as you say, something more than rhetoric and less than relativism? What would that something be?

TB: Well, you've certainly put me on the spot now, haven't you? How about I quote Martin Amis: "Species shame." I think that's an appropriate feeling to come away from My Lai with. (And I did literally sit there for an hour on one of my return trips to My Lai—I've been there three times, which I don't recommend to anyone—and read the guest book from cover to cover.)

JU: Well, and without wanting to put you on the spot more, species shame might also apply to one other aspect of your book that I wanted to look at more deeply. You mention one guest book entry that says something in Spanish about "Vietnam" and "Irak"; in describing Johnson earlier in your book you begin your sentences "Like another U.S. president"; you have also mentioned here that you and your father share extremely different views on Iraq. Do you see a parallel between Vietnam and Iraq? Or should we even engage in such comparisons?

TB: It's no accident that, other than the epigraph and the second-to-last page, the only time I use the word Iraq, or almost use it, is in the My Lai part when I read the Spaniard's entry in the guest book. I didn't want any explicit connection to Iraq, for a few reasons, but mostly because I think the wars are totally, completely different. I also didn't want reviewers to be able to score easy points off any implied equivalence, in either a positive or negative sense. (Of course, this hasn't stopped them.) Different wars, then. Much different. So I told myself during the writing of this book. And while I still feel strongly the wars are not similar in terms of what the insurgents killing our soldiers are seeking to accomplish, I do think, now that I'm done writing, there are some pretty haunting connections to make, and they're all on the American side. Some are shallow—both wars escalated by Texan "decider"-type executives, both wars overseen by a Secretary of Defense eager to "modernize the military"—but some are very, very sad and almost sadistically iterative. For instance: both wars were escalated to fight an enemy (al Qaeda in Iraq's case, the Soviets and Chinese in Vietnam's) that, for various reasons (some very compelling reasons, in the Vietnam example), could be fought only by proxy, but which in both cases wound up strengthening the hand of the very people we were trying to indirectly oppose; both wars entered into with almost criminal overconfidence and a near total lack of consideration of what we were actually getting ourselves into; both wars haunted by early, knowledgeable experts in the regions in question who warned that war would never work; both wars plagued in large part by a refusal to define actual, achievable goals, made worse by surreally unrealistic expectations. I could go on. In many ways I think Vietnam was actually a lot more justifiable as a military action. South Vietnam was on the verge of falling apart in 1965, so there were basically no other options but letting the Communists win or trying to keep them from winning. In Iraq, obviously, there were many options other than warfare. Also, Vietnam had an endgame: a Communist flag flying from the Presidential Palace in Saigon. The Vietnam War ended with two armies fighting in the streets of the capital of South Vietnam. That is not, I don't think, what is going to happen in Iraq. Instead there are militias and factions and sects all with evident goals little better than securing and cleansing their plots of land. There is no endgame in Iraq, which means we could be there for years and years more. Al Qaeda is not going to run up the crescent from within the Green Zone, though the Bush Administration keeps pushing this canard. They say those who want out want to "surrender." But surrender to whom? The hardcore jihadists are not even the biggest of Iraq's problems right now. So within all the similarities, there are enough profound differences to make me cautious of comparing the wars or drawing explicit connections between them. As for my father's view, I think he is like a lot of Americans: when his country is at war, he wants the military to succeed. But I think, especially in the last year, he's begun to realize the absolute ruin that is America's occupation of Iraq. I'm not sure he could ever bring himself to admit that, though—and perhaps because of what it might suggest to him about Vietnam. I don't know. We try to avoid talking about the war, actually.

JU: Just one more question to follow up, then—after all, your book is not about Iraq, and there is a very clear sense throughout the book that, despite your own experiences in the current war (you mention your trip to Afghanistan in the book, and now your coverage of Iraq here) the focus is Vietnam and your father, period. But the book is also about legacies. There is a brief, but very powerful and compelling, section where you talk about who you might have been had you been your father's age, living in that time. And in doing so you discuss one of the most common statements you hear today, that a person can support the soldier but not the war, and how disconnected such a sentiment is from war itself. I was wondering if you could expand on this just a little? For those of us who are civilians and who cannot support this war, but at the same time know very well that the men and women fighting it are the people our parents were, what stance can we take now?

TB: As someone who was reluctantly willing to grant that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was at least theoretically salutary—though that never crossed into advocacy of the war itself—I was simply mystified by those whose militant antiwar positions seemed to completely erase questions of how one deals with totalitarian regimes or the lives of those military action could conceivably make better. And as someone who quickly came to realize that one could attempt something theoretically salutary but through sheer mendacity and incompetence create a factual nightmare, I have struggled mightily with this question, and I'm not entirely sure I can put it better or more thoroughly than I put it in the book itself. I don't support the Iraq War, obviously, but I also don't want to see this country humiliated and its ideals further degraded. Having spent time in Iraq, I also have some basis to believe that the war is supported by a large portion (if no longer a clear majority) of its serving soldiers, some of whom are thoughtful and some of whom are basically armed spouters of various rightist platitudes. Back when I regarded the word "Islamofacism" as an apt and appropriate description of the nature of the enemy we now find ourselves fighting, I would have felt much more comfortable saying that it was possible to support soldiers but not certain aspects of the war they are fighting. This seems to be the mainstream Democratic Party position now: Pull out of futile wars such as Iraq in favor of fighting better the war in Afghanistan, say. This position compels me, I admit. But I've gone through a long, personal process of coming to believe that the threat of Islamist terrorists, while very real, is ludicrously overstated and overfeared, for one reason: There is nothing they can do but hurt us. They can hurt us badly, yes. But we're not going to "lose" to them because we have nothing to lose to them. They could nuke New York or Washington tomorrow and they would be no closer to their "goals" (which basically amounts to a million contradictions) than they are today. The one antiwar position I firmly believe is that we can hurt ourselves (by militarizing our society, by giving up personal freedoms, by behaving in ways that reify Islamist cant, by sanctioning morally indefensible activities such as torture of any kind) far more than any attack by a cunning, widespread, but basically ragtag movement of disaffected jihadists could manage. So when I ask myself if I support the troops in Iraq, I have to say no, I don't, because I don't think they're doing much more than babysitting an entire nation's self-immolation. But do I want US troops to die? Of course not. Do I think they're evil? Absolutely not. Do I think this war is fucking them up? In many cases, yes. So if it were up to me, what would I suggest as a course of action? I actually have no idea. None. At all. But I go back to something Jomini wrote in The Art of War, which has the feeling of truth and sanity, and which would not be a bad few words to have inscribed in every Humvee, Defense Department briefing room, and upon the forehead of every American leader who would even ponder opening up the gates of war for any reason less than national survival:

“[W]ar and aggression are inappropriate measures for arresting an evil which lies wholly in the human passions. . . . Time is the true remedy for all bad passions and for all anarchical doctrines. A civilized nation may bear the yoke of a fractious and unrestrained multitude for a short interval; but these storms soon pass away, and reason resumes her sway. To attempt to restrain such a mob by a foreign force is to attempt to restrain the explosion of a mine when the powder has already been ignited: it is far better to await the explosion and afterward fill up the crater than to try to prevent it and to perish in the attempt.”

JU: That’s a beautiful quote, Tom, and a powerful statement as well. Wow. I think you say it a little better here than in your book, by the way, if only because here you give fuller rein to the implications of both positions. There wasn't really space for it in your book, was there? Thank you.

I guess the only other thing that I wanted to ask you: you spoke of wanting to have this book, if nothing else, as a family legacy to pass on to your children. What would you hope they would take away from it?

TB: That their grandfather was a good man, and that their father did his best both to understand him and preserve a piece of his tiny role in a profoundly sad chapter of American history.

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Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea and God Lives in St. Petersburg, and a contributing editor to Harper's and the Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2006 he was awarded the Rome Fellowship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his work has been selected several times by The Best American Short Stories, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Science Writing series. He lives in Rome.