“I wanted to tell you in person. I ran out of time.”
That’s the first line, and it is the only easy one in eleven pages.
He was not a cook. He was a medic with a reconnaissance company, two tours, and the shadowbox holds a Bronze Star with a V and a Purple Heart with an oak leaf, which means it happened twice. He came home in 1971, put the box in a footlocker, and told my mother he did not want it in the house where it could be looked at.
That part I could have lived with. Half the men of that generation did some version of it.
The second thing in that letter is the part my mother carried for fifty years.
Between his tours, in 1970, my father had a daughter. Her mother was a Vietnamese nurse named Thu who worked at a provincial hospital where his unit rotated through, and he did not know about the baby until eight months after he’d rotated home, when a letter reached him through a chaplain.
He tried. The letter lists what he tried, and it reads like a man defending himself to a jury of one. Two applications in 1973. A congressman’s office. A lawyer in Boston who took four hundred dollars and did nothing. Then the country closed and the paperwork stopped meaning anything and he was twenty-six years old with a wife and a mortgage in a town where you did not talk about that war at all.
My mother knew. She knew from the beginning, which is the thing that keeps stopping me.
She kept sending money after he died. There’s a bank record in that envelope going to 2019, an address in Đà Nẵng, small amounts, four times a year, in her name.
“Your mother has been better about this than I was. She is the only reason there is anything to find. When you find it, do not be angry at her. Be angry at me and then go get your sister.”
Her name is Lê Thị Hà. She’s fifty-five. She has three children and a husband who fishes and she has known about us since she was nineteen years old.
The test came back in eleven days. Half siblings. There was never really any doubt but I needed to see it on a screen.
We talked in April through her daughter, who teaches English and who did the whole hour with a patience I’ll never be able to repay.
The first thing my sister asked was whether he was a kind father. Not whether he looked for her. Whether he was kind.
I said yes. I said he was quiet and he was kind and he never once raised his voice, and she cried and I cried and her daughter kept translating right through it.
We go in October. My brother’s coming, bad back and all.
I’m taking the shadowbox. She should get to decide where it lives.