I drove her home after.
She sat in the passenger seat with her folded lawn chair across her knees. She was tired. Her face was blotchy. She looked like she’d run a marathon.
We didn’t say anything for a while.
“Mom,” I said finally. “Why didn’t you ever tell us?”
She looked out the window at the fields.
“Because nobody wanted to hear it, Carol. When I came home in sixty-nine, nobody wanted to hear anything about that war. Not the protesters. Not the VFW, either. Did you know they wouldn’t let women in the VFW back then? Not as members. We could join the auxiliary. Make the coffee for the men.”
I didn’t know that.
“And then the years went by, and I’d never said anything, and then it seemed too late. How do you tell your children, by the way, I held boys while they died, a hundred and some of them, I stopped counting? When do you bring that up? At supper?”
“I would have wanted to know.”
“I know you would have. I’m sorry.”
She was quiet.
“I didn’t want you to look at me different,” she said. “That’s the truth. I wanted to be your mother. Not a war.”
“You’d still have been my mother.”
“I know that now.”
We pulled into the driveway. She didn’t get out.
“There’s a box,” she said. “In my closet. On the top shelf behind the Christmas wrapping. If you want to see it.”
“Do you want me to see it?”
She thought about it.
“Yes,” she said. “I think I do. I’m eighty-one. Somebody ought to know where it is.”
That night, I got the box down.
It was an old Army footlocker, the small kind. Green metal. Her name stenciled on the lid in white. M. JOHNSON, 1LT, ANC. Her maiden name.
Inside was her uniform, folded. Her nurse’s cap. A Bronze Star in a little blue box that I’d never seen and she’d never mentioned.
A stack of letters from my grandmother, tied with a ribbon.
A photograph of a dozen young women in green fatigues, standing in front of a Quonset hut, squinting into the sun. On the back, in my mother’s handwriting: 71st Evac. Pleiku. Christmas 67. We made it to New Year’s.
And a notebook.
A small one. The kind that fits in a breast pocket. The cover had gone soft and brown.
Inside were names.
Page after page of them. In tiny handwriting. Just names and dates. Some had a hometown written next to them. Some had a word or two. Asked for his mother. Wanted a cigarette. Sang. Laughed at the end.
I counted. I didn’t mean to. I just started counting and couldn’t stop.
One hundred and fourteen.
On the page for February 20, 1968, there was only one name.
Halvorsen, Daniel. Harmon, MN. Knew Dad. Asked about his father. Not scared.
I sat on the floor of my mother’s bedroom with that notebook in my hands until it got dark.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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