When the news comes on, my father sits in his chair, swirling just one jigger of Canadian Mist in a glass of ice water and piling up ashes in a silver-rimmed coaster meant to keep the sweating glass from leaving a ring on the end table. Walter Cronkite is on the screen, and I am learning that I say everything wrong. It’s ce-ment, not see-ment. And “Vietnam” is a word that rhymes with “atom bomb,” not with “Birmingham.” I sit on the floor, my head against my father’s knee, and breathe him in: Brylcreem and Aqua Velva and cigarettes and sweat. Smoke drifts around me as Walter Cronkite gives the week’s casualty count.
I look up at my brother, who is drawing a picture at the table a few feet away, his tongue tucked into the corner of his mouth, his head tilted in concentration. He has not heard a word. He would never come home from that place, I think. When he leaves for Vietnam, he will not be coming back.
Of course he will go: this war has lasted my whole life. Every week for my entire life the news report has included a count of the dead. The war will never end.
Smoke settles on my head, on my shoulders, and I practice saying “Vietnam.” Viet-nahm. I will need to know what to say when I figure out how to get to this foreign land in my brother’s place.