our upcoming final. He said to me, “Why are you so calm? It’s half our grade!” I replied, “Because even if we fail, we’ll still be alive in the morning.”
Vietnam was the most controversial of conflicts, and even with my rank and decorations, I wondered if my father would have been proud of me. I discovered that there was a smugness to many of the older vets. Some of them seemed to believe that what they had done mattered and what we had done didn’t. No matter the rightness of the cause, we, like them, answered the call of our country. We felt the same fear, the same pain, and faced the same risks. But, unlike them, we came back not to ticker tape parades and celebrations but to a largely indifferent and ungrateful nation.
We had put our lives on the line for a war that had initially been popularly ratified by both the politicians and the people. We had risked our lives for their decisions, not ours, yet they hated us for it. But no matter the country’s schizophrenia, to me the war was more than a news story. It was a part of my life. And though it all seemed to have passed by like a dream, sometimes, in those dreams, I would still see the pregnant Vietnamese woman, her neck and forehead pierced, her dark eyes open, staring at me. And each time she would ask, “Why?”
CHAPTER
Thirteen
Wandering through just one paragraph of my father’s history has changed Key West for me more than walking a few thousand miles.
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
Why didn’t I know any of this about my father?
It was past midnight when I set down the book. I suppose we as children are selfish by nature, judging our parents in the context not of their worlds and challenges but of our worlds and how they meet our needs. Even as we mature we rarely think of them as having been young like us.
Reading about my father, more than a decade younger than I was right now, leading a group of men through a murderous jungle, cast him in a different light. He was stronger and more courageous than I had ever given him credit for. He was better than me.
Of course I knew that my father had served in the war, but I’d never given it much thought. I certainly had never understood it from his perspective. The only time we had spoken about Vietnam was when my eighth-grade history class was studying the war and I asked my father if he knew anything about it—which was like asking the pope if he knew anything about Catholicism. Outside of that discussion, he never spoke of it. I didn’t think he was traumatized by the experience, but rather that he had moved past it, and chose not to be defined by it any more than any other experience in his life. Perhaps it had made him moreserious, but, considering his father, I think he would have been a serious person whether he served in the war or not.
I think the war might have affected him in another profound way. It taught him the true and temporary nature of all things—that nothing remains the same forever. Perhaps that’s what got him through my mother’s death.
I arrived at the hospital the next morning eager to talk to my father about what I had read, but he was asleep when I got there. I sat there for nearly an hour, reading, before he woke.
“What time is it?” he asked.
His voice startled me. “It’s nearly ten.”
“I slept in,” he said in a deep voice. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“I’m sorry. Do you want some breakfast?”
He didn’t answer immediately, but looked around the room. “Maybe in a little while.”
“I read pretty late last night,” I said.
“What did you read about?”
“You. Your childhood. Vietnam.”
“Nam,” he said, as if he were speaking of a person. “That was an interesting time.”
“Interesting or terrifying?”
“Both,” he said. Then, surprisingly, he suddenly grinned.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
He looked back up at me. “I just remembered something funny.”
“In Vietnam?”
“I’m sure even hell
Alexandra Ivy, Laura Wright