Semifictional

As emotionally powerful as this is, there is a slight disconnect here: he is describing events in Vietnam that actually happened (stunning, little-remembered details about the American evacuation, including the story of the last two Americans to die, in John Kerry ’s words, “for a mistake”), but the events in Michigan — his father’s drunkenness and isolation, the disintegration of his parents’ marriage — are a semifictional, if plausible, recreation of what Bissell imagines his father to have been like during that time.