Free My Father Before Me by Chris Forhan Page A

this summer of her second pregnancy, this summer of 1950, she began to fear that possibility. In late June, North Korean forces invaded South Korea. Ed, a member of the marine reserve, was called up to active duty. He would be going overseas, almost certainly.
    My father was not stupid; he had known that joining the marines meant possibly getting shot at. Still, he had enlisted in peacetime, and he had done it not out of a blundering or starry-eyed patriotism, not out of a desire to sacrifice himself for his country—or for another country, across the ocean, that he likely could not identify on a map. He had enlisted out of shrewdness and necessity, as a means of putting himself through school. Now he had a wife and child and another baby on the way. To the military, that did not matter: he was a soldier; if called upon, he would go. As for Ange, she was not eager to see Ed leave her yet again, especially when this time there was a chance that it would not be him, but his boxed body, returning to her on a troop transport. Also, with Ed gone, she would not be allowed to live in student housing, and she didn’t know how she could face returning to the home she had escaped from.
    In the midst of their worry, with my mother four months pregnant, my parents decided to be kids again, without plans or obligations, if only for an afternoon. They rarely visited the Careys, Ed’s grandparents; they entered that house only when formally invited for dinner, and they weren’t invited often. But on an August day, the sun dazzling and the sky a boundless blue, they pulled their bicycles out onto thesidewalk and, one of them carrying Terry, wheeled their bikes a mile and a half to the Careys’ house. They were not expected. When they arrived, Ange handed the baby to Ed’s grandmother. Would she watch Terry for a while? They were riding their bikes to the lake. Grandma Carey said yes—she must have understood that there could be no other answer.
    This little outing was important enough that my parents brought their camera along. They were already remembering the day in advance. Ange took a photo of Ed standing on the wooden porch steps of his old home, posing between his grandparents. Ed is goofily attired, as if he has woken abruptly from a deep sleep and found himself unexpectedly on an island vacation but without the full wardrobe. He sports wrinkled bathing trunks, a light short-sleeved shirt, dark dress socks, and street shoes. At his side, his grandfather wears the grim, contrived smile of the imposed upon.
    Then my parents were gone, flying off on their bikes, as if in a last burst of youthful abandon, down the gradually declining hill to Green Lake. They took photos of each other there, future proof, as they posed on their bicycles on the dirt track that edged the lake. Four years earlier, they had come to this lake in their white clothes, looking giddy and innocent and filled with the promise of teenage love. The Ange of this photograph, in her one-piece strapless bathing suit, white ankle socks, and saddle shoes, seems little changed. She looks like the fresh-faced college girl who, in a different life, she might have been—a young woman with her whole enticingly undefined life ahead of her, although she is already vaguely plump around the middle, someone else’s life, again, growing within her.

18
    Ed had one chance to stay in Seattle and avoid Korea: he could apply to the air force ROTC program at the university, but he would be accepted only if he excelled in the required exam. If taken, he would avoid active duty as long as he was enrolled in school.
    About two hundred men passed the exam. Ed was in the top thirty of them. He had dodged a bullet. Maybe more than one.
    That winter, instead of being hunched in a ditch in the snow near Toktong Pass, he was home for the birth of his second daughter, Patty. And he was home for the phone call—the one from his father.
    Nat Forhan—Fred