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and my typically squirrelly classmates are all seated quietly when I arrive because my dad has the kind of face that tells teens he does not fuck around. I’m sweating profusely, nervous both for my father and for myself, because even when you truly love your parents as a teenager, you are also horrified by nearly everything about them.
    Nothing about my father screams “Vietnam vet!” to a group ofkids whose main Vietnam reference is Forrest Gump’s Lieutenant Dan. My dad is one of the lucky men who arrived home physically unharmed and able to keep their emotional wounds from seeping through to the surface, though sometimes at night I will hear him cry out in his sleep from down the hall. He looks like any other middle-aged white guy, really: gently parted hair, polo shirt, khakis. Just any old Bill O’Reilly fan who has taken a break from his daily golf game to stand in front of a few dozen teenagers at his alma mater and tell them the dark things he hasn’t spoken about in decades.
    It’s silent for the full fifty minutes while my father talks, and I’m surprised by the fact that he’s prepared transparencies of the country of Vietnam for the overhead projector and by the fact that when he begins, I can sense a small tremor in his voice. Nothing anyone else would notice, just a small signal in a frequency detectable only by those who love you.
    My father’s only mementos from the war are a sweatshirt so small that I’ve worn it since seventh grade, when it was the closest thing to a grungy-skater-girl outfit I could muster when my parents wouldn’t let me shop at Urban Outfitters, and a small shadow box with a few snapshots, his bars, and a swastika pendant—an auspicious symbol in Buddhist cultures, a gift from a villager. As I watched, during those fifty minutes, that entire shadow box come alive. I saw my father, in his late fifties by then, as the eighteen-year-old who left these same classrooms to ship himself off to war as an enlisted marine. He was just a boy when he carried these dead friends on his back. This is the first I’ve heard of any of these boys, these ghosts he has carried with him for over thirty years.
    When he is done speaking, he offers to answer any questions from the class, and my entire body tenses.
    â€œWhat’s the worst thing that happened to you?” this dipshitnamed Mark with a butt cut asks my father, and I feel every hair on the back of my neck bristle. The fuck’s the matter with this kid—besides his haircut and his Uncle Fester face—that he would ask my father this question, clearly so off limits in so many ways?
    But my father doesn’t skip a beat. He tells us about struggling to pull the body of a fallen marine onto a helicopter during heavy fire, how one of his friends stepped forward to help and was instantly killed by a bullet that would have instead ripped through my father’s own skull.
    Mark lowers his head, unable to meet my father’s earnest gaze. The bell rings, but nobody stands up until my father dismisses them.
    After class, I follow him out into a bright, hopeful Minnesota afternoon to play hooky for a daddy-daughter lunch. I don’t ask him about anything he just told me and a bunch of other teenagers; I just settle into the passenger side of his black Lincoln with all his ghosts.
    JUST A FEW MONTHS AFTER their deaths I struggle to recall the details of these favorite tales from my husband and my father. Was it fourth or fifth grade when a strange boy at the playground asked to see Aaron’s basketball, then kicked it across the highway? How possible is it that I could find that boy today, now an adult male close to forty, and kick his ass? What was my father’s company, again? First Battalion, Alpha Company? First Recon Division? The Hawks? No, that’s a sports team. No, it’s an animal.
    Today I went to another funeral. As a Catholic, funerals are both ritual and