The boy believed his father was a sort of demigod. The boy’s father was a war hero, the perfect soldier, and an asset to the army. His father had fought in World War 2, met his mother in Berlin, started a family, and was eventually shipped back to America. Women and men alike fawned over his war hero father; men slapped him on the back and shook his hand and women likened him to Audie Murphy, the soldier turned actor. The boy followed his hero father’s every move, dreaming of the day he would be a soldier, too. If his father drank too much, the boy never saw it. If he glimpsed his mother’s tearful face in the bathroom mirror, just before she closed the door, he never let himself understand what those tears meant. If his father hit him with his riding crop, it was because he was a disobedient child and not because his father wished him harm. When his father left his mother and his four brothers and sisters, it was because his mother was a wretch to live with. The boy understood. When his father did not write to him, even though the boy checked the mailbox daily, it was because his mother hid the letters, or because he was on a top-secret mission for the Army; of course he would write if he could.

  Later, when the boy-soldier was stationed in Vietnam, he looked up with eyes blurry from too much alcohol, and saw his demigod father at the end of the bar, flirting with a Vietnamese waitress. And when the soldier-boy, who hadn’t spoken to his father since he’d left his mother all those years ago, eagerly approached his father, and his father frowned at him, it was in surprise, not disapproval. And even though his father told the boy to pretend to everyone else that their last names were the same because the boy was his brother’s son, and not his own, it was not because his father was ashamed.

  When the soldier-boy returned home, a soldier-man now, he waited for his back to be slapped in congratulations and his name to be whispered on women’s lips. He waited for his father to write to him and tell him how proud he was of his soldier-man. The soldier-man waited, but none of these things happened. His war was just not the same war that had produced such wonderful heroes and, to everyone’s surprise, America was not the omnipotent power that they had believed it to be.

  The soldier-man went to see his mother for the first time since his return from that foreign land. His mother insisted that he allow her to cook for him, slowly making her way around the sparse kitchen. He saw clearly the lines on her once beautiful face, saw the blue eyes reflecting a sadness that made his insides seize. The tears came before he could stop them, pouring down his face and racking his body with sobs. It was only then that the soldier-boy was able to understood what his father really was.