Tunneling through War
Seeking the light and the end . . .
“I guess the war will never end,” my mother wrote home in October 1974.
Long before the horrific Hamas attacks on Israeli citizens last week, I had been planning to write about the Cu Chi Tunnels in Vietnam, not knowing that that terrorist group also employs such underground tactics.
It seemed an eerie coincidence, an unwelcome echo of war’s long reach.
Then, just a couple of days ago, I encountered another coincidence, one that took my breath away. I was using Focusmate, an online co-working space in which you are connected with another user somewhere in the world.
You state your goals for the session and then work quietly together. At the end of the session, you share a quick recap of work completed before signing off. I’ve been paired with people from all over the world and, because of the nature of the efficiency model, we usually do not exchange much small talk.
However, this time, “Amir,” said it was nearly 10 p.m. where he was, over seven hours later than my East Coast time zone.
“Oh my, where are you?” I asked.
When he replied, “Israel . . . Jerusalem,” my hands flew to my face and I blurted out, “Are you safe?”
“For the moment,” he said, his face drawn. “I hear missiles but they are farther south.”
I immediately thought of a similar line my mother had reluctantly penned long, long ago:
“I hear several explosions right now – – will probably read about a battle at Bien Hoa in the paper tomorrow. Coming in from the movie the other night we saw explosions in the distance. So, it is a real weird situation and very restrictive . . . hard on those of us that live and thrive on the great outdoors . . . and I guess the war will never end.” ~Nancy Rabdau, letter home, October 1974
My original draft for this week—an essay about the Cu Chi Tunnels—was intended both to foreshadow next week’s post, a remarkable essay by my MFA colleague Debbie Merion and to introduce you to a book that affected me deeply: Falling through the Earth by Danielle Trussoni.
The former you will be able to read in this space next week while the latter is a 2006 NY Times Book of the Year and available here. (I earn a small commission if you buy via this affiliate link. Bookshop.org also supports local bookstores.)
In the memoir, Trussoni interrogates the maze of her relationship with her father after he returns, broken, from the war. When he went over, as many did, wide-eyed and eager, and both his brash confidence and his youthful naivete induced him to volunteer as a “tunnel rat,” a soldier who repeatedly lowered himself into shadowed entrances and extended dark spaces in an effort to rout out the hidden enemy.
As part of her exploration, Trussoni travels to Vietnam to come to terms with what the war did to her father. At the Cu Chi Tunnel attraction, she descends, as he did, into the underground network of tunnels. She goes as a tourist with a friendly guide, but nonetheless experiences a gut-wrenching sense of fear:
Deeper, deeper we went. I paused to scratch a wall with my fingernails, a sensation that sent shivers up my spine, a spidery prickle that asked, What the hell are you doing here?...
Though she expresses regret in that moment, her underworld tour does ultimately reward her with the peace, or at least the understanding, that she seeks.
I find I am both filled with envy and revulsion at her act of lowering herself into the earth that way. I know I do not have the guts, the wherewithal to follow in those footsteps. It may be because of the way my father reacted to something my mother once said about me:
“You look just like Jane Fonda with your hair like that.”
It was an innocent statement; my mom was only thinking of the current ’80s fashion of frying the lanks framing your face with a curling iron so that they flipped coyly back from your ever-cheerful smile.
My father just about had a cow.
“Good God. Don’t ever say that. She’s nothing like Jane Fonda.”
It was years later that I found out why he had been so upset. Jane Fonda, in July of 1972 had been photographed sitting in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunner’s chair. She had been an outspoken opponent of the war and had traveled to Hanoi as the U.S. military involvement was waning. She hoped her trip there helped bring the fighting to a close even faster. Instead, the image of her occupying an enemy’s seat sparked new controversy. (Note: Fonda later apologized for that moment and said her intention had never been to slight America’s soldiers.)
Somehow, in the shadow of my father’s disgust and my fear of misstepping, I know I will not be able to enter into a space like the tunnels, or ever rest myself on a piece of North Vietnamese military equipment.
The experiences of those who have, however, as in Trussoni’s book or in the upcoming Merion essay, are well worth reading, however.
They set one’s fingers on the thick and still-pulsing heartbeat of war—and without the prickle of that intimate and personal touch, how we will ever find a way to end such useless violence?
Near the end of the book, Trussoni writes:
Fifty-eight thousand American soldiers had died in Vietnam, and yet those numbers meant nothing to me until I walked into Washington alongside the dark mirror of the Vietnam Memorial wall and traced one name . . . with the tips of my fingers . . . although twenty thousand American children were orphaned by the war, it was only when I looked at my own life that I saw the hole that Vietnam created, for all of us.
Though I have excavated my memories of living too close to the shade of war as an eight-year-old (my family lived in Saigon from July 1974 through April 1975), I still cannot get used to the sight of it.
The news images of war are a cascade of too-oft seen atrocities, but the face of Amir is stark in my mind. He is still there in Jerusalem, half a world away. If I could but fall through the earth, through a tunnel that would connect us all, I might see him in person.
But what could I do there? I could only embrace him and say I am sorry. Could I offer to pray?
In our brief time together, Amir said, “It is an impossible situation. Each religion feels their God says they have a right to this place.”
This stricture of religions is perhaps why I have been more and more attracted to the Buddhist philosophy of non-attachment over the years. Trussoni happens upon a Buddhist temple where she is led to an altar that is crowded with lit joss sticks, the air thick with the smoke of burning prayers. An old monk speaks to her in Vietnamese and a young monk translates:
“He says you must pray.”
“Pray for what?” I asked as he lit the incense with the plastic burner.
“You will know,” he said, guiding me to the altar, “when you begin.”
Trussoni thought back to a home film of her youth . . .
The tape forced me to see that, more than anything, my father had been defeated by Vietnam. He had lost his war, his pride. Nothing would change that. I folded my hands, as I had been taught to do in grade school, and I asked for my father’s illness to disappear. I prayed that all the terrible things that happened in Vietnam—to Americans and Vietnamese alike—would never happen again.
I prayed for the one thing my father and I had never shared: peace.
***
Find out more about my work and books at Kat-Fitzpatrick.com. My narrative nonfiction story, For the Love of Vietnam: a war, a family, a CIA official, and the best evacuation story never heard is available by request wherever books are sold.
Good idea. I’ll send you something to post in a couple of weeks. Just getting organized again after being away.
Kat, thank you for this insightful piece. By linking one friend's tragic loss of her father (although he was still alive he was lost to her) because of his Viet Nam experience, to another friend's loss in the horrific attack in Israel, you have helped universalize the experience of loss through war.
I wonder, wouldn't it be a wonderful breakthrough if "each religion," as Amir says below, could realize that they are both correct? That "God says they have a right to this place?" If both sides could recognize the Divine right of the other, might that be a great starting point? The result might be not either or, but both.
"In our brief time together, Amir said, 'It is an impossible situation. Each religion feels their God says they have a right to this place.'”