War wounds: a father and son return to Vietnam.(Letter From Vietnam) From: Harper's Magazine | Date: December 1, 2004| Author: Bissell, Tom | COPYRIGHT 2004 Harper's Magazine Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

In the beginning was the war. Many children of Vietnam veterans, when they look back on their adolescence, feel this with appropriately biblical conviction. In the beginning was the war. It sits there, in our fathers' pasts, a dying star that annihilates anything that strays too close. For the growing-up children of many vets the war's remoteness was all but impossible to gauge because it had happened pre-you, before you had come to grasp the sheer accident of your own placement in...