If my father hadn't drawn the ridiculously fortuitous draft lottery No. 363, he likely would have headed to Vietnam. If he was lucky enough to survive — and that is quite an if — who knows what sort of man would have come back?

This manner of question is not hypothetical for author Tom Bissell. His father, John, is a decorated Marine veteran. The elder Bissell, quite literally, left a part of himself in Vietnam, and, in an emotional sense, carries a part of the nation with him to this day.

The aftermath of the war ushered John Bissell into the sickly embrace of Johnny Walker Red for many a year. His marriage crumbled. Even today, while his sons undoubtedly love and respect him, they make no pretensions of understanding him.

So in one of the most generous editorial assignments since Hunter S. Thompson was directed to Las Vegas, Tom Bissell talked GQ Magazine into sending him and his father to Vietnam for a voyage of discovery.

GQ never got the article they assigned and Bissell, understandably, doesn't go into details about that. But what he did produce is "The Father Of All Things: A Marine, His Son and the Vietnam Legacy," a flawed but oft-dazzling travel memoir and history of the Vietnam War.

The grafting of John Bissell's wartime experience, his family life in Northern Michigan afterwards, Tom Bissell's early life and observations and an almost obsessively researched chronicle of Vietnam and its 25 years of civil war and conflict with the French and Americans does not always stick together cohesively (read that paragraph again quickly and you'll understand).

Despite Bissell's skill as a writer — which is formidable — the book often reads disjointedly and alternates too greatly between chatty travel writing and scholarly history.

Simply put, this book would not work if Bissell were not an excellent writer. Good news for him (and his readers) — he is.

Bissell's opening salvo is a one-two punch alternating between the apocalyptic last days of the Vietnam war and pieced-together accounts of his father coping with the images of horrified Vietnamese trampling each other and futilely hurling their infants toward U.S. troop transports as the last remnants of America's presence in the south cut and ran.

Bissell writes with a gut-wrenching, pounding intensity and, in the book's early going, manages to engineer the anarchic collapse of South Vietnam and his father's alcohol-saturated wallowing into a symbiosis that sustains the book's breakneck pace. The horrific retellings of wanton slaughter, betrayal and the sickening feeling we'll be seeing this again before too long in Mesopotamia make this a difficult history to stomach.

It's a pace that can't be sustained forever, though, and Bissell breaks character on page 79 after he's just described his shattered father forlornly peering at a bowl he's destroyed while joylessly washing the dishes in the pre-dawn hours. That scene, the author admits, was actually something out of Nabakov. It was just the saddest image he could think of.

Of course, this alters the book's momentum the same way engaging the parking brake while accelerating down I-5 will alter your weekend plans in Los Angeles. From here on in, Bissell does not achieve cohesiveness with the varying angles of this book, though they often succeed individually.

Bissell is a top-rate travel writer, and that accounts for some of the most enjoyable and rollicking sections of the book. He's a fun, curious and intelligent tour guide and it's a joy to see what piques his attention:

• "Ancient thin Vietnamese women with raisiny skin sold cans of Red Bull. Poorer old Vietnamese women sold the local knockoff, Super Horse. Even poorer old Vietnamese women sold the Super Horse knockoff, Commando Bear."

• "My father pointed out the thumb-sized pad of wear on Truong's steering wheel where he had literally beeped the wheel's covering down to its greenish underleather. Truong's horn-per-minute usage: 14.5."

• "The weather was so rough during the U.S. invasion that the first landing had to be postponed. The waves looked truly splendid today — huge and blue and rolling beneath frothy crowns of white foam. But there was no one out here. These slum-town beaches were completely empty. It appeared that Charlie really did not surf."

Tom Bissell's crackling wit and his caustic-but-loving relationship with his father ("I raised a great son — and you") make for natural travel literature, and the many observations and history lessons Bissell slips between the places he and his father go (both physically and emotionally) are prescient and obviously well-researched.

Several times, however, Bissell jarringly interrupts his own storyline with "Queries." For example, "Query: Was Ho Chi Minh a Stalinist?" This reminds one a bit of the lofty discussion topics Linda Richman used to posit upon her audience on "Saturday Night Live" and, while dutifully researched, they read more like a high-grade term paper than a complex work of nonfiction — and I'll put this bluntly — one reads because he wants to, not because he has to.

These queries highlight Bissell's intelligence and research, but not his warmth. They really do feel grafted upon the book and come off as a demonstration and justification of the author's exhaustive preparation. Incidentally, the author believes Ho was -- indeed -- a Stalinist, but probably the nicest Stalinist you'd ever meet.

"The Father of All Things" would not make a good buddy movie — despite Tom Bissell's apoplectic fear of snakes and his father's joy in shouting "there's a cobra!" whenever the two pee in the jungle. The father does not have an epiphany about Vietnam as a result of visiting his old battlefields and meeting the men at whom he tossed grenades, Hershey bars or both. The father and son do not have a dénouement in their relationship.

As the world's nicest Stalinist once said, "Remember, the storm is a good opportunity for the pine and the cypress to show their strength and their stability."

And in surviving the hell of Vietnam, John Bissell did that, too. But his son is still left with the unanswerable question: If not for the war, who would this man have been?