Toy Soldier

Sometimes I wish he had killed them, the Vietnamese woman and her son, the ones whose throats he slashed during the war. Sometimes I wish his tears were real. Or the dreams that make him cry out, as he shivers in his sweat-soaked sheets. The helicopters, he murmurs, Dustoff coming to get us the hell out. I wish he could be so honestly tortured.

I know the weight of what he carries, how heavy the memory of battles we have failed to fight. I confronted him once about the stories, told him I knew the truth, that boot camp was all he knew of the Marine Corps.

You don’t know anything he snapped. There are things you just can’t know.

That much is true. There are many things I am unable to understand: how the brain can stitch a memory from desire, how delusion becomes fact in the replaying. In the rehearing, I consider the possibilities—my father the secret operative, the invisible war vet, honorable service conducted without reward.

Sometimes I wonder whose stories are real, which one of us has it right. The language between us has lost all meaning. Signifier, signified–it’s all nonsense.

Like wishing he had killed them.

What can I love you mean to me, when that woman and her son—figments of my own imagination now—tend the rice paddies, giving thanks to their god for peace? What can I love you mean from the mouth of a stranger, speaking in a language I can only wish to understand?

This essay first appeared in Collateral.