Free Letter to My Daughter by George Bishop Page B

camp up in the hills in the middle of nowhere, and yet on Christmas day a giant double-rotor Chinook helicopter magically descended from the clouds to deliver full turkey dinners to all 120 boys at the camp. They had corn bread dressing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, shrimp cocktail … “Shrimp cocktails! Where the heck did they get shrimp cocktails?” Tim wrote.
    And just as the recruitment sergeant had promised, there was Budweiser beer, all you could drink. Hell, they even had a bar right there on base, with Vietnamese girls in shiny long dresses and pigtails serving martinis. Scruffiest bunch of soldiers you could ever imagine, and their hooches nothing but falling-down shacks propped up with sandbags, but he wasn’t complaining, not yet. More than anything he was looking forward to getting out and seeing some of the countryside. As radio intelligence, his missions were strictly top secret, so he wasn’t allowed to say when and where he was going exactly, but he’d write me as often as he could. And where were the letters I promised him, by the way? I had his address now so there wasn’t any excuse.
    “I keep thinking back on that night,” he wrote. “Hard to believe it was only a year ago. Already seems like ten. But when I close my eyes I can remember like it was yesterday. I see your white skin on the rug, and the firelight glow on your hair, and that soft look in your eye when you told me you love me. I swear, it’s the one thing that keeps me going. I’m sure glad I got you back home waiting for me. You’ll always be the number one girl for me, Laura Jenkins. Now write!”
    That spring at Sacred Heart, meanwhile, I was finally beginning to feel myself more a part of the school. To be sure, I still had little in common with the well-bred Catholic girls who were my classmates. But over time people can adapt to almost anything, I suppose. Even prisoners begin to feel at home.
    My fitting in had to do mainly with my work on The Beacon . I’d begun a series of profiles on SHA personalities called “Spotlight On … !” Kim gave me half the third page to write about whomever I wanted, and for the first time in my life I felt what it’s like to wield some power. Girls who had never before been nice to me now smiled and said hello in the hallways. Faculty took me aside to give me subtle and not-so-subtle suggestions about which teacher or student would be a good subject for my next profile. I hadn’t written about Principal Evelyn yet, Sister Agatha reminded me. She had a very interesting background. Why not interview her? Surely she deserved a profile.
    But I ignored all their suggestions and turned instead to my truest allies at the school, the charity cases. Over lunch in the cafeteria, I interviewed Soo Chee Chong, the quietest girl on campus. Who ever knew that Soo spoke fluent Mandarin? Or that she had ended up in Baton Rouge, of all places, because her parents, both prominent university professors back in Beijing, had fled the Cultural Revolution to avoid being killed by the Red Guards? If they didn’t like you, Soo said, the soldiers would just walk up to you in the street and shoot you in the face. The whole family had made a lucky escape through Taiwan, smuggled across the strait in the bottom of a fishing boat, which was why to this day, Soo said, she couldn’t stand the smell of raw fish. Her name in Chinese, she told me, meant “the beautiful sound of jade.”
    Anne Harding, after years of surgery and doctor’s visits, turned out to be an expert on scoliosis. The piece I wrote about her, “Profile in Courage,” dwelt on current medical treatments for curvature of the spine and what could be done to prevent it. Curvature, Anne explained, was measured in degrees of variance from the vertical. At eighteen degrees, hers was considered a mild curve and could be corrected with bracing in 90 percent of the cases. If left untreated, however, the deformity could worsen, twisting the chest until