Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,19

heroism or patriotism, but please don’t say you’re doing it for me.

Before I left him that night, Tim stopped and held my face in his hands. As the yellow glow from the root-beer sign seeped into the cab of the truck and the June bugs swarmed beneath the streetlight overhead, he studied my features like he wanted to score them forever in his memory.

The one good thing you can say about war is that it forces you to value the present. It makes you consider last times: this could be the last time I see you. These could be the last words we speak.

“I’ll never forget you,” he told me.

“I’ll never forget you, too,” I promised.

You stupid, stupid boy, I would say today. Where did you get the idea this would make me love you more? I loved you regardless.

I’m sure you’ve seen film clips of the war in Vietnam on TV, Liz. Always alongside the footage of the soldiers fighting in the jungle, you’ll see the hippies back home protesting the war: the thousands of long-haired youth marching on the Capitol, burning flags, putting flowers in the barrels of rifles. “Make love, not war,” their banners read—a phrase that made my mother click her tongue over her knitting and my father grumble about “disgusting punks.”

Seeing those pictures, you might think that the whole country was caught up in the war. But for the girls at SHA in Baton Rouge in 1970, the war in Vietnam was a million miles away. It was no more real for us than I Dream of Jeannie or Gilligan’s Island. The good sons of the good families who sent their daughters to our school didn’t go to Vietnam. The good boys who attended Cathedral High School two blocks over didn’t go to Vietnam. There was no need to even talk about it. In probably much the same way you feel about the war today, it just wasn’t our concern. We had more important things to worry about, things like math tests and school dances and hairstyles. It was only when Tim enlisted that the war began to become real for me, involving real people with real names and actual events.

We had arranged that I would pick up his letters at his father’s repair shop in town, and I received the first one two weeks after he left. “Private Prejean now,” he wrote. “How do you like the sound of that?” Their drill sergeant at Fort Benning, Sergeant Millhouse, was a real hard-ass; he’d chew your head off for the slightest little infraction and then make you say how much you loved him. Tim had to do fifty push-ups for not having his razor clean during bunk inspection. “Can you believe that nonsense?” As far as he could tell, the sole purpose of all the rules and regulations—which were the most random bunch of BS you could ever imagine—was to turn new recruits into a pack of non-thinking, nonquestioning, standard-issue remote-control robots whose only purpose in life was to obey and kill. The army didn’t even try to disguise this fact, Tim wrote. God help the poor recruit who answered his drill sergeant with “But sir, I thought—” “Did I tell you to think? Did I?” Sergeant Millhouse would scream. “You will not think, you will not wonder, you will not question! You will love me and this army! Do you love me and this army?” “Yes, suh!”

“Craziness,” Tim wrote. But at least his company looked out for one another. They were a bunch of good ole boys from farms out west in places like Laramie and Walla Walla and Provo, and towns closer to home, like Natchez and Hattiesburg. He had aced the map-reading tests and navigation runs out in the woods. Turns out he was a pretty good shot with the M14, too. “All that squirrel hunting with my buddies back in Zachary must’ve paid off, I reckon.”

The army, for now at least, didn’t sound so bad in Tim’s letters. He seemed to enjoy it. Even when he was complaining about it, he seemed to enjoy it.

I wrote back that I was working on a surprise for him for when he came home in a year. This was a scrapbook that I had begun, with the idea that I would gather all the important events of my year together in one place so he wouldn’t miss a thing while he was away. I suppose I was too ambitious at first. By the end