“How about a hike—want to climb a mountain, just a small one?” Molly asked Zimmer. Molly and I had the feeling that my mother was just going to stare at him; it was a good idea to do something physical with him. In 1967, Molly was roughly forty-seven. Bromley isn’t a big mountain, but—from the end of mud season till the first good snowfall—Molly hiked up Bromley, and walked down, four or five times a week. I had to work hard to keep up with her on a hike. That day, Zimmer set the pace; Molly and I had to make an effort to keep up with him. “You’re in good shape, Zim,” Molly told him. “I can tell you’ve been doing a lot of marching around.”

“Second lieutenants are supposed to be platoon leaders—we’re supposed to set an example,” Zimmer said. My mom wasn’t a runner or a hiker; she didn’t even like to walk. The only way Little Ray would climb up Bromley was to skin up with her telemarks on. I was glad my mother hadn’t hiked up Bromley with us. She would have found it even harder to still see the smallness in Zim.

At dinner, Molly mentioned the anti-war protests in April of that year; there’d been huge protests in New York City, Washington, DC, and San Francisco. The protests didn’t concern Zimmer; he wasn’t opposed to the protests, but they weren’t a solution. “The problem is, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong are fighting the war on their own terms—their large units never engage our large units,” Zim said. “Look what happened with Operation Buffalo, in one day—this was just last month,” the future platoon leader told us. There were two companies of marines involved in an ambush from three directions. Zimmer talked so fast, I later had to look this up—Alpha and Bravo Companies, First Battalion, Ninth Marines. They first encountered sniper fire from the People’s Army of Vietnam; the marines were then attacked with flamethrowers, artillery, mortar, and small-arms fire. There were so many details of a military kind, I lost track of whatever point Zim was making. He’d even memorized the number of casualties the two companies of marines had suffered, and the Vietnamese casualties. “We had eighty-four killed, a hundred and ninety wounded, nine missing in action—while the People’s Army of Vietnam had fifty-five killed, not counting another eighty-eight believed to be dead but unaccounted for,” Zimmer recited to us. My mother just stared at him, drinking her third beer; Molly mostly stared at my mom. I’d not seen Zim drink beer before, but I noticed he had a couple. When Zimmer got up from the table to go to the bathroom, my mother also got up from the table; she threw up in the kitchen sink.