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Her Father's War

By Kelly Connolly (reviewer)

Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir
By Danielle Trussoni
(Henry Holt, 2006)

The most persistent image in Danielle Trussoni's memoir is that of her trailing desperately after her father as he attempts to escape: stalking a deer through the snowy woods; ducking out of a bar to avoid girlfriends; speeding in his pickup, wary of police. The book centers on her struggle to understand her father, and how his experience as a tunnel rat chasing the Viet Cong in Vietnam affected her family. She yearns for the love of her father, despite his excessive drinking, irrational violence, and inability to deal with his wives, girlfriends, or children on an emotional level; years later, she yearns for an understanding of the man who was irrevocably scarred in war, years before she was born. When he is diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, the acknowledgment provides some comfort for his daughter, but the pain from hearing her father's stories remains; the mental images, the photographs, and the unexplained skull in her father's basement persist.

The sorrow that runs through her story emanates from her father and washes over the lives of his wives, children, and girlfriends, who are drawn to his solitary magnetism and repelled by his inability to endow his relationships with anything but the bare essentials of human care. He remains in a perpetual winter in La Crosse, Wisconsin, aloof, reliving his experiences in Vietnam as if they are more vivid than the many people who look to him for love and approval.

Her father, Dan Trussoni, recently passed away from a ravaging cancer that was caused by his exposure to toxic herbicides in Vietnam. But the book is not focused on politics; it concerns the pervasive and unsettling way her father's war experiences devastated her family.

Scrounging for quarters for food, choosing sides when her parents divorced, and growing up without a stable guide left Trussoni with a fierceness and confusion in her own relationships. Having spent her childhood years accompanying her father to his regular bars in La Crosse and absorbing his war stories, Trussoni goes on a mission to Vietnam to see the tunnels her father entered in terror in Cu Chi and elsewhere, but following her father's ghost, she cannot find the thing she seeks. The sad truth is that her father's vibrant youth was left there, never to be restored.

Her stories are open-ended. They lead down paths that are painful, but in looking for a father that could never be completely there for her (and her brothers and sisters, some newly discovered), she takes an honest look at her childhood, growing up with a man full of vitality but broken by events beyond his family's control.