And so it was strange to see Chiggers now. He had called my parents’ home in Alhambra and they in turn had given him my grandmother’s number. His voice through those miles of electric cable had sounded not unlike the crackling sound of my radio, and for a moment, so fleeting it was hardly present at all, I felt myself back in the muck and mud and blood, back in the fear, but then that sensation was gone and I was on the phone in my grandmother’s living room, listening to Chiggers tell me that he would be on the way to Oregon to attend his cousin’s wedding and could he stop by. I said yes and gave him my grandmother’s address. When he finally arrived we drove around some and got more than half stoned on the fine Southern California pot he had brought with him from San Diego. Now we occupied a booth at a mostly deserted Denny’s restaurant attached to a long rambling motel pressed hard against the interstate at the very edge of Auburn, the seat of Placer County and a town of six thousand or so souls.

I had never seen Chiggers outside of the military, and the man before me did not much resemble the man I had known in Vietnam. He had exchanged his fatigues and buzz cut for a denim shirt, pointed beard, and shaggy hair, not quite what we would have called long in 1969 but certainly on its way. It is a strange thing to say but in Vietnam I had never thought of him as Hispanic. Though he sometimes joked about being Mexican and peppered his curses with Spanish, what we did in Vietnam and who we were in that country seemed to diminish those differences, or rather made them irrelevant, although for me to say such a thing as a white man is problematic in ways I have tried to untangle for all the years since. Sitting across from me in that booth at Denny’s in that small town, Chiggers looked like the scruffy Latino mechanic he had been before the war, a life he had returned to afterwards, and I, for all my friendship and love, wondered what the other patrons in the restaurant thought of us, both of us bunny-eyed and giggling like crazy people.