Jim went on. A group of widows had launched a project to connect Vietnam veterans with their lost comrades’ families, with emphasis on MIAs. An attorney from Chicago named Norman Hatcher reached out to them, looking for my mother on behalf of his dear friend John LaRue, who, it turned out, was never missing in action, but in fact, had been killed in a covert operation in Cambodia. At the time, the Army was denying any activity across the borders of Laos and Cambodia, so the mission was kept a secret, and the KIAs were filed as MIAs until the Army could come up with a passable cover story. Norman Hatcher was with my father when he died, and promised him that he’d go back home and find his girl, Bonnie, and tell her that he loved her. The task turned out to be harder than he’d expected; he’d given up until he’d received word of the widows’ project. The widows, it seemed, were much more resourceful and determined than the men themselves.

“We flew Norman Hatcher down here,” Jim said. “He stayed with us for a few days. He was a kind man. He talked a lot about Jesus. He’d become a born-again Christian. I think that’s why he’d wanted to find your mother, and you. That’s right, your father knew about you. It’s in the letters.”

I struggled to hold the letters steady enough to read them. They were written in block script, surprisingly clear and nimble, given my impression of John LaRue. His words were not remarkable—plainspoken declarations of love, vows of devotion and determination to come home and rescue me and my mother, to live happily ever after and so forth. The sort of words any soldier in a combat zone would write to the girl back home, who had become the focus of all of his hopes in the midst of all of that terror and brutality. The thing that kept him going, perhaps even the thing that kept him sane. Nevertheless, they stirred in me a sensation too deep and powerful to name. For a short while, Arch and Vanessa and the quandary in which I had so foolishly implicated myself vanished from my thoughts. My father knew about me. I had existed to him before he died. Had he lived, I would have known him. Perhaps he’d have come home and married my mother. Perhaps I’d have lived an entirely different life.