30.

Oh, it was hide and seek for me. Running and running: running as fast as I could to get away. Vi-et-nam. Vi-et-nam. Vi-et-nam. Those three awful syllables. In my brain I was running, running, running. No one could help me, not my dear, gone dad, not my dear, sweet pudgy mother. No one, oh, no one, no.

I think I ran for years and years until it all caught up with me.

By the early 2000s, I had such prosperity: the BMW; the children in private schools; the perfect yuppie life; and there I was in Washington, DC, visiting an old friend, drinking Pinot Grigio at his mansion in Georgetown and spending the night at the Sheraton near the White House, right where presidents got their hair cut.

I have everything, and the next morning—Sunday—I take a cab to the Washington National Cathedral for Easter services and there is Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor doing one of the readings and all of us look happy and educated and prosperous and I’m in the cathedral bathroom changing into running gear and putting my dress clothes in a backpack and then jogging down Massachusetts Avenue past the Naval Observatory where the vice president lives.

Lovely, lovely the spring day. It’s me and mansions and Al Gore and Sandra Day O’Connor. Lovely, lovely the air as I go running, running, running, just as I have two or three times a week since 1968, and then ahead of me is a line of people walking between two ropes on a sidewalk in a park and people are laughing and talking and suddenly I realize I’m in the line to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and people are getting quieter and quieter and I don’t know what to do except move along though I don’t want to be here and it’s kind of like the way I went into the army and then there in the black granite is the first name I see and then the second and the third. Dale R. Buis, the first GI dead in Vietnam, followed by Chester Melvin Ovnard, except I later learn that Chester’s name is misspelled on the wall, that it should be Chester Melvin Ovnand, and then I think they can’t even get the names right and you and I and all the others are wading deeper and deeper into the dead and it’s Maurice Flournoy and Alfons Bankowski and then they’re adding up and I remember the box scores on the nightly news with Walter Cronkite and the United States supposedly winning the World Series of War and I’m walking deeper and deeper into the names of the dead. Frederick Garside and Ralph Magee and Glenn Matteson and why, I wonder, am I here and when will this stop and a homeless man wearing a wool blanket—exactly the kind of blanket we had in the military—is pointing at men and saying, “You. You. You’re a brother, right? You’re my brother aren’t you?” and then he’s pointing at me, as if some secret thread from the back of the tapestry connects us to each other, “You. You. You’re a veteran, right?” and I’m nodding yes and I’m shaking my head no and I’m walking deeper and deeper into the names of the dead. Leslie Sampson and Edgar Weitkamp Jr. and Oscar Weston Jr. and I can see my face reflected in the polished black granite among the names and the homeless veteran pointing at me and there is Mr. Niederman and the pregnant woman and we’re all there in the vast reflected land of the dead, us and them, us and them, reflected back and forth.