Chapter 1
My brother, TJ, was going to war, and I was fired up hotter than a volcano. TJ and I had grown up in the Army, we were the Colonel's children, but that was not the same as being a soldier in the ve...
Chapter 2
We'd been playing war all our lives, and more than once TJ had said he'd like to get a taste of real combat, to see if he could handle it. (2.29)
Chapter 3
"For boys, maybe. Not for girls. Girls ain't supposed to cuss at all." "That's a stupid rule. Either everybody cusses or nobody cusses." (3.17-18)
Chapter 4
I was dying to know what the war was like. TJ's letter to my parents hadn't said much at all. […] There was nothing in it that let you taste the true flavor of war, smell the smoke of bombs, hear...
Chapter 5
TJ had a good eye. You'd look at pictures he'd taken of an old stone wall circling round some ancient city, and you'd see things you hadn't when you were standing right in front of it. You'd see th...
Chapter 6
The worst thing was that she was an eleven-year-old girl whose brain was still on the first-grade level. She could read and dress herself and ride her fancy bicycle in wobbly circles around her fro...
Chapter 7
It's a funny thing, printing a photograph, because when you're in the process of doing it, you're paying attention to the tiniest things, like the fingers on a hand, trying to get them to show up i...
Chapter 8
I took the picture from TJ and examined it more closely. There were bags under the Colonel's eyes. He was carrying a briefcase, but by the slump of his shoulders, you'd think he was carrying a suit...
Chapter 9
What emerged on the paper was a picture of a GI in a wheelchair, his right leg amputated at the knee and wrapped in a white bandage. He looked so much like TJ, I gasped and took a step backward. I...
Chapter 10
"Ah, you know how it is when a guy's being sent off to war." Private Hollister leaned against the mop he was using to clean up spilled beer off the floor. "He gets a little wild. Mostly they're jus...
Chapter 11
Was he trying to scare me? Or was he just trying to tell me that war wasn't anything like the way we'd dreamed it, playing with our little green Army men under the trees? (11.22)
Chapter 12
When TJ had come home for a few days after basic training, he'd looked like a completely different person. He looked like a soldier. I was almost scared to talk to him. (12.1)
Chapter 13
"It's a worthless war?" My mouth hung open. The Colonel was calling Vietnam a worthless war? (13.26)
Chapter 14
"Too many memories. I look at all my negatives and I ask myself, why do I want to remember that?" (14.24)
Chapter 15
On the wall behind him hung plaques in neat rows announcing his various awards and honors, and directly over his head was the 1st Cavalry insignia, needlepointed and framed by my mother. (15.12)
Chapter 16
There's a moment in the darkroom, when you hang your negatives to dry, that you finally see what occurred the moment you opened your camera's shutter to let in the light and make a picture. I was l...