Contradictory Accounts of My Father’s Return from Vietnam, August 1970
A verifiable fact: The Army discharged my father from his tour in Vietnam three days early.
He claims on the military plane from Long Bihn to Honolulu he white-knuckled his exit. He’d endured more than enough during the war and was eager to get the hell out without further ado.
On the flight, my father was fed scrambled eggs and white toast as he witnessed the sunrise. He remembers the breakfast, remembers spreading butter and grape jelly on brittle bread, and looking down at a turquoise gem that was the ocean surrounding Hawaii.
In Honolulu, my father stayed on the same plane that took him to Oakland Army Base. He was promptly served a second breakfast and then a third when he departed San Francisco for San Antonio.
“I don’t know why, but I ate all three breakfasts,” my father said. “Didn’t pass on any.”
Given the time zone changes and long fights, my father’s memory likely starts to blur right about here.
My mother claims my father hadn’t notified anyone of his early discharge, so when he arrived in San Antonio he used a payphone to dial her at work. Jackie, her redheaded manager at the department store, held the phone from her ear.
“Sylvia, your boyfriend is back from Vietnam,” she shouted nonchalantly as if all this were just another ordinary Tuesday.
“I was surrounded by racks of silk blouses when Jackie said my boyfriend was on the line. I thought it was a prank.”
“I’m at the airport,” my father said.
“Where?” my mother asked.
“In San Antonio, silly,” he said.
My mother told him that she was on her way, grabbed her handbag, and ran to the curb to hail a taxi.
“I wondered how I was going to find him at the airport among the crowds, but your father was leaning against a window. I spotted him right away,” she said.
When my father asks her now what he looked like that day, she says sunburned from the jungle.
Together my parents headed to my maternal grandparents’ house, kissing each other between long stares while maneuvering my father’s awkward camouflage duffle bag out of their way.
“Are you hungry?” my mother asked him in the cab.
My father shook his head and explained he’d eaten three breakfasts, almost all identical. A total of six slices of toast. It was, according to my mother’s watch, almost 3pm.
* * *
My father tells a different story about his return from Long Binh, Vietnam. According to his memory, he few into San Antonio on a commercial airline. This detail coincides with what my mother recalls. But at the airport, he remembers being greeted by his father and mother. My father can’t recall how they were notified, only that they were at his gate. Since my grandparents lived over an hour north of San Antonio, they had to have driven down in anticipation of his arrival.
My father recalls the three breakfasts, the sickness of having eaten so many servings of eggs, toast, and orange juice. He was dying to stretch his legs after having been seated for so long, strapped into a tiny seat, having peeked down at so many quadrants of land.
The camouflage duffle bag, he recalls carrying. I ask what it contained. “My shitty threadbare clothes. Letters from your mom. She wrote me all the time, mailed me photographs of herself striking poses in her living room. I had gifts for her from Japan, a black lacquered jewelry box, a navy blue kimono.”
Since I’m hungry to learn more about my parents as twenty-year-olds, I ask if he had books—what he read in Vietnam. I ask as if his answer will make sense of the war, of what corrupted his health and peace of mind. His answer is pulp novels, but he can’t recall any titles.
All my grandparents have died, so I can’t corroborate either of these accounts. I recognize each narrative is romanticized to the hilt, daydreams cast in soft peach light, each version giving my parents what they needed and most wanted after a perilous separation.
What my father easily remembers is the reunion hug he had with his parents. My stoic grandfather enveloped him in a tight hug. My grandmother squeezed herself into their embrace. Her firstborn had returned. This child she’d named Manuel afer the Lord Emmanuel. This boy who never so much as wanted to be a Boy Scout, much less a member of the military. This young man who the Army promoted to sergeant. Her son had miraculously survived when everyone’s sons were shipped back in body bags. My grandmother gripped his ribs, his waist. They inhaled each other deeply and sighed. My father insists he recalls their collective scents: the aftertaste of orange juice on his own breath, my grandmother’s lilac perfume, and the dank mix of his sweat mixed with his father’s.
“¿Listo?” my grandfather asked.
Perhaps it sounded like he was asking my father if he was ready to leave behind every mortar bombing, landmine, and helicopter roar. Regardless of what my grandfather meant or implied, my father nodded and they started the trek back home.
Ursula Villarreal-Moura (@Ursulaofthebook) is the author of Math for the Self-Crippling (2022). Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Tin House, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, Bennington Review, and the anthology Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction. In 2012, she won the CutBank Big Fish Flash Fiction and Prose Poetry Contest, and her writing has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015.