Posted: Oct 9, 08 2:14pm
Whenever Jan googled her father's name, she would get a zillion hits because he had one of those names you see everywhere--his name took up three pages in the phone book. She knew his name and that he had red hair and was this Green Beret or something when he met her mother in the fall of 1969.
As much as she could figure out, he wrote her mom some kind of letter or something before going to Vietnam; she never saw or heard from him again, and he never knew that Jan was born. She wondered as she searched the internet if he could be the President of the Rotary Club in Ames, Iowa; the author who writes travel books, or was he maybe the mass murderer in upstate New York?
On a brilliant, early-spring day in Washington, D.C., she walked up to the Vietnam veterans' memorial for the first time, looking for his name--it was there. Maybe, she thought with a lump in her throat, it wasn't him.
