I slid it out, and I had to sit down, because it was a flat gray box about the size of a wristwatch case, and taped to the front of it was a letter with a St. Louis postmark and my name and service number typed across the top.
National Personnel Records Center. I have known what that envelope looks like since 1975.
Inside the gray box was a Bronze Star. Folded around it, a citation with my name on it, my unit, my company, and a date in November of 1968 in the Que Son Valley that I do not talk about and have never once talked about at that kitchen table.
The awards paperwork for our company went in with everything else that burned in the records center fire in 1973. I wrote them twice in the seventies. The second letter came back saying my file was among those destroyed and there was no supporting documentation, and I decided a man does not beg the federal government for a piece of ribbon, and I quit. I said so out loud exactly one time, on a porch, drunk, in 1986, and Ruth was sitting there with a coffee cup and did not say anything back.
She started writing in the spring of 2021. It was all under that lining with the medal, held together with a paper clip, in order.
Eleven letters. Requests for morning reports. A request for the unit’s general orders, which she learned to ask for by number because somebody at a veterans office in Zanesville told her how. A photocopy of my discharge with her sticky note on it. Two notarized affidavits — one from Delmar Kearns in Missoula, Montana, who was nineteen years old the last time I saw him, and one from a widow in Sikeston whose husband was our platoon sergeant and who mailed Ruth his footlocker copy of the orders with my name in the third column.
My wife found two men from my platoon by telephone. She did not know how to work a computer. She used the phone book and the operator and the American Legion, and she wrote in that careful schoolteacher hand, and it took her twenty-two months.
The correction to my discharge is dated in April. She was gone in May.
Her note was folded around the citation.
You’ll figure out what it’s for someday. A wallet is where a man keeps what’s his. This has been yours since you were twenty years old, Bill — they were just thirty-nine years late handing it over. Don’t you dare put it in a drawer. — Ruth
I sat on the floor of that bedroom with a two-dollar homemade wallet in my lap for a long time. I had wanted a watch. I said it’s fine, Ruth in a voice that meant it wasn’t, and I shoved the thing in a drawer, and she said nothing, because she already knew what was sewn into it and she was going to let me get there on my own.
She stitched that lining shut by hand. Crooked, uneven, the seam she was apologizing for all evening. It held for a year in a drawer I couldn’t open.
I carry the wallet. It’s lopsided and the stitching is bad and it does not close right. The medal is in a case on the shelf where the grandkids can see it, and when they ask me about it, I tell them their grandmother went and got it.