Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,31

the good and bad of education: as the world grows bigger the more you learn about it, so the neighborhood you came from seems to grow smaller. Now all of Tim’s talk about shopping for homes and settling down began to make me nervous. I was only seventeen years old, after all, still just a girl. Maybe in Zachary, Tim’s plans wouldn’t have seemed out of place, but here at SHA none of my classmates got married and had babies right after they graduated. They went to college, got jobs, dated, had fun. What was his hurry, after all?

And the truth was, most of our relationship had been through letters, hadn’t it? Letters that, in spite of all their sweet words, had an air of make-believe precisely because they were only words on paper. They were abstractions, barely real. If a letter got lost in the mail, the world inside its envelope might as well have never existed. Or if you left a letter in the rain, the ink would blur and wash right off, carrying with it any evidence of the reality the words had ever represented.

But all this was mere justification, I knew, for the troubling realization that as my life at Sacred Heart Academy began to feel brighter and more hopeful, the life of Tim’s letters began to feel that much more dim and complicated. It was the giddy teenage world of Winter Formals with aluminum foil stars and dream dates, pitted against the frighteningly adult world of tours of duty in Vietnam and down payments on aluminum-sided homes on muddy suburban lots in small-town Zachary.

And honestly, which do you think a seventeen-year-old girl would choose? Which would you choose, Liz?

The choice became all the more difficult when around this same time, Tim’s letters began to undergo a change. I barely registered it at first. Tim was such a naturally optimistic person that it would have been hard to recognize anything like despair creeping into his words. And the story only appeared in bits and pieces, never all at once—just a fragment here, a sidelong reference there. But as the weeks went on, it became apparent that something awful had happened to Tim, something that cut a deep and lasting scar on his soul.

The story, as I was able to piece it together, turned around an incident that happened when he and his buddy were out on a surveillance mission. By his accounts, everything was done by the book. For three or four weeks they had been monitoring suspicious activity in a village in a neighboring valley. There were trucks rolling in and out of the village at night, fluctuations in the population, new huts being erected around the perimeter. Radio transmissions eventually confirmed that the village was a transport hub for the Viet Cong.

So one morning after getting the go-ahead, Tim called in the coordinates for an air strike. Twenty minutes later a single F-4 Phantom jet screamed over their heads and dropped a neat load of ordnance: two missilelike Hammer bombs that tore straight through the palm trees toward the village, followed by one stumpy-looking napalm canister that tumbled end over end as it fell, like something accidentally dropped from the back of the plane. Explosions rumbled like thunder up from the valley floor. The jet veered off to the left and disappeared over the hills, leaving clouds of dense black smoke and fire pluming in the valley. An eerie quiet settled on the mountaintop. All the birds had fallen silent. Mission accomplished.

This was when Tim and his buddy usually packed up their gear and headed back to base. But, oddly, radio transmissions continued to issue from the bombed village. Since they were the only troops in the vicinity, Tim and his partner were ordered in to “have a look-see.”

“I normally have nothing to do with this kind of thing, you understand,” Tim explained in one of the letters. “We do our radio business and get out of there.” But orders were orders. They hiked down from their camp on the ridge, helmets on, rifles out, just two skinny radio geeks in boots and camouflage clomping and slipping down the mountainside. They came out onto the dirt road leading to the village. Black smoke continued to billow over the palm trees ahead, a good sign that they’d hit a weapons cache.

The first thing was the sound, Tim wrote. They heard it as they approached the village, a high, spooky wail, something stuck halfway between animal