Father of All Things 13d

In 2004 the acclaimed author Tom Bissell was at work on his story collection God Lives in St. Petersburg when Harper’s commissioned him to write an article on his father’s experiences in Vietnam from the perspective of both the war-torn father and the soul-searching son of a veteran. In Vietnam circles, the name of Tom’s father, Jack Bissell, somewhat preceded itself, In Phil Caputo’s A Rumor of War, one of the finest memoirs of the conflict and the first Vietnam book to become a major best-seller, Caputo learned of the death of his friend Walter Levy, who survived all of two weeks in Vietnam. He remembered a night in Georgetown when he, Levy, and some others went to a bar “to drink and look at girls and pretend we’re still civilians.” And then this: “We sat down and filled the glasses, all of us laughing, probably at something Jack Bissell said. Was Bissell there that night? He must have been, because we were all laughing very hard and Bissell was always funny.” Tom Bissell’s article turned into a two-year odyssey, one that begin with a magazine piece in Harper’s and ended with a 376-page memoir of a father and son’s journey to twenty-first century Vietnam.