Matthew Zimmermann turned twenty-five in October 1967. We were the same age when Zim went to Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division, on December 13 of that year, but I turned twenty-six only five days later. In truth, Zimmer was almost a year younger than I was. As I read in one of the press reports, the news of Lieutenant Matthew Zimmermann’s death was carried to his parents’ Park Avenue home on a Sunday (February 18, 1968) by a special representative of the secretary of the army. Zim’s father, Colonel Thomas Zimmermann, said only that his son was killed in action in Vietnam on February 17, 1968. A more explicit press report, quoting the official telegram of notification, stated that Zim died from “wounds received while on a combat mission when his unit came under hostile small-arms and rocket attack while searching for remains of a missing soldier of his unit.” (As Nora later said, this sounded like an official telegram; a lot was left to the imagination.) Knowing Zim’s ideas concerning what second lieutenants were supposed to do—a platoon leader was expected to set an example, and to take care of the platoon—I was not surprised to hear how Zim died, searching for the body of a missing soldier amid a rocket attack and small-arms fire.

When I called my mother in Manchester, I was a little surprised to hear what the trail groomer told me. “Your mom has shut herself in the bedroom—she’s not talking about it,” Molly said, not in her usual voice. I could tell she was trying to keep her voice down. “I should have shot him in the driveway, Kid—I had a pretty good angle, out the kitchen window,” the ski patroller told me very softly. I knew Molly was trying to protect me from my mother, who not only must have been talking about it; knowing Little Ray, she probably had a lot to say. “There was nothing obstructing Zim’s knees when he was doing the lunges,” Molly was saying, more softly, when I heard my mom calling. (My mother might have been in the bedroom, but the door had to be open.)

“Is that my one and only?” I heard my mom ask.

“Better hang up, Kid,” Molly whispered to me.

“You should have let me shoot him! Both of you are to blame! Zim would be alive if you had let me shoot him!” my mother screamed. “He was just a boy—Zim was a little boy! He was still growing!” my mom was wailing, again, when Molly hung up the phone.

I read somewhere that daily burial rates at Arlington National Cemetery peaked at twenty-eight in 1967. Zim’s burial was described to me in a letter from another Exeter wrestling teammate who was in the military: Zim was buried on a grassy knoll at Arlington, under the same kind of government-issued headstone as the good soldier beside him—Zim’s grandfather, General Joseph Zimmermann.