Please take care of yourself.

Glenna

I spent ten months in I Corps, the northernmost military region in South Vietnam. I was assigned to the provisional recon element of the Red Devil Brigade, and we were tasked with peeking around the uglier corners of Quang Tri Province, 2,000 square miles of jungles, mountains, and deep-serious trouble. My first week in-country I wrote Glenna another letter, but I never received a reply.

I rotated back to the World with plenty of stories to tell. Those first couple of years I was back, you may have heard some of them if you met me in an airport bar. You might have heard what it was like lying along a spur of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, setting ambushes, calling in artillery fire or air strikes on convoys, and running search-and-rescue missions to recover downed pilots.

What you would not have heard about was my wrestling with the greatest irony of all: I went off to war and it was my father who died—died right in our backyard, sitting at the redwood table with Uncle Jerr, Aunt Lil, and my mother, who held his hand until the ambulance came, too late as it turned out, to do anything for his overworked heart.

I was granted an emergency leave to attend the funeral, and my commanding officer, a lifer who had done three tours of the Nam, used his contacts to arrange an early-out discharge for me at Fort Hamilton. I had kept a journal over there, and I was considering turning it into a book when my former CO phoned. He was retiring and planned to set up a consulting firm in DC. He had been a fan of my after-action reports and asked if I’d like to work with him.

Truthfully, I had no desire to relive my war in prose, so I moved to Washington. Over the next two years, I often thought about Glenna, but couldn’t see any reason to get in touch with her. Washington is a lonely town because it is loaded with transients, which also makes it perfect for the hit-and-run relationship, and I had as many of those as possible between cab rides to and from the airport.

Our business took off. I bought a town house in Georgetown and made a hobby of trying to quit smoking. My aunt and uncle sold their place in Jersey and rented an apartment in Manhattan, and my mother followed suit, taking a two-bedroom on East Thirty-Fifth Street. My sister, Elaine, came from Boston to lend a hand with the move, and I took the train up the next week to help my mother settle in. We spent the day unpacking boxes, and it was after five when we went to sit on her small terrace. I was drinking Michelob out of the bottle and wishing I had a cigarette, while my mother kept glancing nervously at her watch.

“Mom, you got an appointment?”

“I may have made a mistake.”