“The snap answer is to say I wanted to protect and to serve. But because it’s you asking, I’ll tell you the truth. It wasn’t because I had a desire to protect and serve or to be some sort of do-gooder public servant. When I think back on it, I actually just wanted to protect and serve myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, at the time, I had just come back from the war in Vietnam, and people like me—you know, ex-soldiers from over there—they weren’t really accepted back here. Especially by people our own age.”

Bosch looked around to see if the food was coming. Now he was getting anxious about waiting. He looked back at his daughter.

“I remember I came back and wasn’t sure what I was doing and I started taking classes at L.A. City College over there on Vermont. And I met this girl in a class, and we started hanging out a little bit, and I didn’t tell her where I had been—you know, Vietnam—because I knew it might be an issue.”

“Didn’t she see your tattoo?”

The tunnel rat on his shoulder would have been a dead giveaway.

“No, we hadn’t gotten that far or anything. I’d never had my shirt off with her. But one day we were walking after class through the commons and she sort of asked me out of the blue why I was so quiet . . . . And I don’t know, I just sort of decided that was the opening, that I could let the cat out of the bag. I thought she would accept it, you know?”

“But she didn’t.”

“No, she didn’t. I said something like, ‘Well, I’ve spent the last few years in the military,’ and she right away asked if that meant I was in Vietnam, and I told her—I said yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. She just did one of those pirouette moves like a dancer and walked away. She didn’t say a thing.”

“Oh my God! How mean!”

“That was when I really knew what I had come back to.”

“Well, what happened when you went to class the next day? Did you say anything to her?”

“No, because I didn’t go back. I never went back to that school, because I knew that’s how it was going to be. So that’s a big part of why a week later I joined the cops. The department was full of military vets, and a lot had been over there in Southeast Asia. So I knew there would be people like me and I could be accepted. It was like somebody coming out of prison and going to a halfway house first. I wasn’t inside anymore, but I was with people like me.”