“Don’t be surprised if my father doesn’t talk much,” I say to Scott , my friend and writing buddy, who offers to ride with Sunil and me to get my mother in Knoxville. She’ll spend the week of Thanksgiving with me in Atlanta.

My father will not come, will only drive her to the halfway point in between.

He doesn’t know my phone number or address, has no way to get in touch with me if something bad happens. I remind my mother of this often.

“I know,” she whispers, so no one else will.   “I know.”

“Don’t expect my father to stay for lunch,” I tell Scott.  ”He’ll drop my mother off, high-tail it back home as fast as he can.  He’s always been this way.  If he’s in a good mood, he might tell jokes.  They will be annoying,” I assure him.

Sunil has met my father before, but Scott hasn’t.  Scott knows how many times I’ve tried to write about my father, quit mid-way through every project, insisted I was ready to move on, write something else.

I never did.

I tried.  All my other projects ended up in the same place–right back to the war.

Scott’s presence makes me nervous.  I don’t know if my father will be in the mood to meet a stranger.

I haven’t seen my father since July, the only time Sunil and I went home this year.  I barely spoke to him.  He barely spoke to me.  It takes a lot of energy to avoid each other the way we do.

I am distant as usual when my parents get out of the car this day in late November.  I need to stand back, watch to see how my father acts, the way his eyes look, before I get too close.  When I hug my mother it is short-lived, mechanical.  I watch my father shake Scott’s hand and then Sunil’s.  He watches me to see what I will do.  We reach to hug each other at the same time, barely touch before we both pull away.  My heart races.  What is he thinking?  

I am shocked when my father agrees to stay for lunch.  My mother doesn’t even have to cry or beg.  She wouldn’t do that today.  Not in front of Sunil or Scott.

My father is only staying because of them.

My father and Scott immediately strike up a conversation.  Sunil and my mother talk.  I watch from the sidelines, add a little now and then.

At lunch, the five of us sit together at a cramped table.  I want to ask my father if he’s still going to do this project with me, but I’m afraid.  Some of my family members have discovered this blog already.  They don’t know how to respond, so they don’t.  Not to me, anyway.

I can only pray they understand the good intentions with which it is written.  It must be hard to hear these things about the little girl they knew my whole life, yet never knew at all.  I didn’t let them get to know me.  I couldn’t.  Momma and I had to protect my father.  We couldn’t tell my family, couldn’t tell anyone what was happening back then, didn’t realize our own souls would be eaten alive when we didn’t.

I am trying hard to look at things now from my family’s perspective, about how they will feel when they’re reading this.  I hope they can also see mine.

Sunil is leaving tomorrow for Europe.  It’s an emergency business trip, and he doesn’t want to go.  He took the week off to be with my mother and me for Thanksgiving.

Now he can’t be.  My mother and I will be alone together for seven days straight.  That scares me too.

At the table this day, my father  asks questions.  Where in Europe is Sunil headed?  How long will he be there?  What will he be doing?

Sunil answers.  I cut in.

“Have you been to Europe?” I ask my father.  I have known him for thirty-one years, and I don’t know where he’s been other than Vietnam.

He shakes his head.  ”No.  Never was in Europe,” he says.  His eyes are soft now.  He smiles a little.  ”Only Vietnam and Australia.  I went to Japan, but never made it out of the airport.”

“You went to Australia?” I ask.  ”I didn’t know that.”

“Went for R and R.  Right in the middle of ‘Nam.  Went to Australia, and never even saw it,” he says.

I’m confused.  ”What do you mean, you didn’t see it?”

“I found a pub as soon as I got off the plane,” he says.  ”I spent the whole week in that pub.  Drunk til I was crazy.  I must have slept in the hotel upstairs, but I don’t remember going back there.  Someone must have carried me.  After a week, I had to go back to Vietnam.”

My mother’s eyes bulge.  She thinks alcohol is liquid devil. I wonder if she knew he used to drink.

“You used to drink?” I ask.  I have to hear it again just to believe it.  I don’t ever remember my father drinking.

“Every chance I got.  Most soldiers do. Hard to do it back in the states, though, because I was only twenty when I left ‘Nam.  Drinking age was twenty-one.”

I’ve never thought about this before.  My father was drafted to war, put his life on the line to serve his country, came back and couldn’t even legally buy a beer.

I am ashamed to admit it, but I don’t know anything about Vietnam.  I’ve never asked, never paid attention in history class.  I took a class on Vietnam in graduate school, thought I’d finally forced myself to learn something about the war of which I was desperately afraid.  All I remember is My Lai.  After I saw videos of that, I wrote poetry the whole time to distract myself.  I haven’t wanted to know about the war.

“Couldn’t vote either,” my father says.  ”Had to be twenty-one back then to do that too.”

He shifts in his seat, looks around the restaurant.

My father was talking.  Talking about the war.  With me.

It was hard to believe.  Why hadn’t this ever happened before?

He tells of the time several years after the war when he went to the federal building in Roanoke, Virginia, to try to get his disability.  He took a recorder with him in a big black bag.

“Bet they thought I had brought a gun with me,” he says.  ”I told them fellers they weren’t recording me unless I recorded them.”  My father let out a big, booming laugh.

He sat back in his seat.  ”I left that day with my disability.”

My father talks about how he felt the mist when the airplanes sprayed Agent Orange in the jungle, how the gun ships came in and dropped the weapons.  He talked about a gun ship named Puff the Magic Dragon.  ”‘Send Puff out here,’ we used to say, when we called to our superiors.  ’Send Puff out this way.’”

“How did you know you had to go to the war?” I ask.  ”Did you get a letter in the mail?”

“I got the letter when I was eighteen,” he says.  ”I told them I was flatfooted and colorblind, been that way my whole life, couldn’t see the letters they showed me.  I was telling the truth.”

“‘We’ve got you boy,’ they told me.  ’Don’t play dumb.  You ain’t going nowhere.’”

My mother’s hands are folded in front of her face.  She’s going to cry.  I hold my breath and pray she won’t.  I can’t stand to see my mother cry.  My whole life, I have seen too much of that.

Scott asks my father if he had symptoms of Agent Orange, if he knew what it was back then.

“I just knew it killed the plants,” my father says.  ”They came down in planes and sprayed it all over everything like crop dusters.  It was ten years later before I heard that stuffed was called Agent Orange, before I knew what it could do.  That big mass didn’t come on my lungs until a few after that.”

My father grins.  ”Dumbness comes from Agent Orange too.  That’s one reason I’m like this.”

Here come the jokes.  I roll my eyes.

Suddenly, my father’s eyes are tired.  He looks wrinkled and old, his skin loose around the sides.  He is the spitting image of his mother.  I’d never noticed this before.  It’s been a long time since I really looked at him up close.

“All these doctors want to dope me up, put me on all kinds of drugs, but I tell those suckers what I think.  I tell them my guitar does more for me than any drug I’ve ever had.”

It is starting to make sense now.  All those birthdays, all those Christmases, when my father was locked in his room, playing his guitar instead.  At nights, I fell to sleep by the sound of that guitar.  In the morning, I awoke to it.  It was a piece of my father, an extension.  Still is.

“Who is the best guitar player in the world?” he used to ask me, mid-song, as I sat as his feet.

“You are,” I’d always yell.  He smiled when I said that, looked happy.

I still believe it.

My father shakes his head and looks down at his place.  ”I did some things that were wrong, but I always tell people that I made it out the other side.  I made it,” he says.  ”I survived.”

Everyone is silent.  I take a deep breath and nod.

My father’s food is still on his plate, piled in a heap.

To read Day 9-2, click:  http://unitedchildrenofveterans.com/?p=234

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