This is an old house. Once upon a time, probably following World War II, it sheltered more than one family. I know this because there is an upstairs kitchen. I suspect one of the previous owners rented out space in the basement because there is a little room set off there, complete with built-in closet and a functioning bathroom and what once served as an outside entrance. Now that room is affectionately known as The Room of Return, where assorted stuff gets stuffed, dusty luggage, an unused antique sewing machine, a rollaway cot we use at Christmastime, a high chair for when the grandkids visit. And an old safe that came to rest in this room after my parents retired, sold their California house and rented a small place here in Washington to be near Bear and Brendan and me.

I never had reason to open that safe. My mom took care of the family records and accounts and the like. When someone needed a birth certificate for a passport, say, or some such document, she would be the one to retrieve it—and carefully put it back.

But in 2021, five days after my brother, Doug’s death, she suffered a heart attack at age ninety-nine. After recovering from that she lived in a nursing home, wheelchair bound. Sadly in 2023 dementia robbed her of her sunny personality and she became increasingly volatile and angry. Hospice helped with medication to calm her. Doing the paperwork for hospice (probably looking for my dad’s 2012 death certificate) I ventured into the Room of No Return and opened the safe.

On the topmost shelf there were the usual documents attesting to marriages, births, deaths and a divorce, but there were also two hardcover folders and inside I found an array of onion-skin carbons and other papers relating to my dad’s long struggle to get my brother’s Army discharge changed to Honorable, as well as the October 1969 letter I wrote to my father, still in its University of Delaware envelope. I glanced briefly at these documents, but not more than that; my energies and obligations were focused on my mom.

On my daily visits to the nursing home, I certainly wasn’t going to bring up what I’d found in the safe; that was the perhaps the most anguished chapter in my mom’s life. I would not even mention that I had opened it. Especially not now when her moods were so unpredictable. But I did take these folders to Applied Digital Imaging here in town and asked to have them printed and digitized as pdfs.

The receipt is dated November 22, 2023. Oddly, I remember going to pick up the documents that day, and the kindly assistant there, making the usual small talk, asked, “How are you doing?” With unusual candor, I replied, “Oh, not too good. My mom is dying in a nursing home, and it’s very hard right now.”

She died just a few weeks later, early December, having just tested positive for Covid. The holidays ensued, the usual flurry of intense activity, followed, sadly by another death of someone close to us and the confusion and activity attendant on that loss. Then, suddenly, February 2024, there was no more influx of people needing to offer comfort and be comforted. No more daily visits to the nursing home. And so, I opened the hardcover folders and read the documents I had had copied

I was unprepared for the storm of emotion I felt. Unleashing all that fury and flurry of recollection, I wrote some sixteen pages, mostly of what I knew interspersed with bits of what I’d learned. The writing itself convinced me that I knew very little. I started to keep a record/diary of what I’d learned, what I read, what I wrote.

The below is from February 2024:

“So, several days ago I start to think: where is the other side of all this correspondence. why are there no replies here? And so, at the end of my working day, c. 3:30 or 4 I went down into the basement and on the bottom shelf of the safe, there it all was, some thirty or so big American Cyanmid envelopes, maybe fifteen pounds of paper. I put it all in a box and brought it upstairs and spent three days going through it, putting stuff in folders, marking the folders, marveling and being horrified and trying to imagine—and trying not to imagine. Again, I ask: am I equal to this? Secondarily, is it worth it?”

The sheer volume of work, even the idea of the amount of work, was overwhelming, especially when it became clear that the pdfs could not be copied or pasted into a Word doc (old computer.). The thought of having to retype each/all of these letters defeated me, to say nothing of the troubling memories and conflicting emotions they aroused.

Also from my February 2024 journal:

“So, I go into Applied Digital Imaging today with almost no hope of changing these PDFs into Word Docs so that I can move forward with this fucking project for which I have no name. And this woman just did it for me. Kelly L. That’s her name. Right there on the spot. Easy. Fast. And she didn’t charge me anything. And on top of that, a glance at today’s horoscope for me said that ‘A stranger will do you a significant kindness.’ Is that cosmic or not?”

It was cosmic. And it absolutely was a significant kindness. In the last pages of Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice, due out July 7^th 2026 with University of New Mexico Press, in the acknowledgments, I thank Kelly by name.

Because when I brought home the thumb drive and plugged it into my computer, I knew “this fucking project for which I have no name.” could be a book, indeed, that it must be a book. That I was the only one who could tell this sad story and that it must be told.

But in the throes of reading, re-reading all these pages and writing, re-writing to give them context, I came to realize that these documents were far more than dry rustling pages. They resonated with unforgettable voices, most of them from the grave: the desperate father, the teenage soldier’s wail from a psychic abyss, the sympathetic military lawyer, the loyal Congressman, the rock-ribbed Republican who, amid the swirling Watergate scandal, offers help to a stranger, a truly significant kindness

By March 2024, I made this note: “This whole project is much more variegated than I’d thought. There are ripples within ripples. There are places/times when my father seems unhinged in these letters, as if the writing of them alone was an outlet for him. He was writing furiously long before Doug came home. Writing as if D’s life depended on it.”

Doug’s life did depend on it. That much was clear. Was I equal to the task? I had to be, though my hopes to move swiftly through the reading and the writing, those were soon dashed. Every time I went back through the material, some new insight left me reeling. In the years I donated to Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice, I came to see that the Room of No Return had metaphoric validity quite apart from the antique sewing machine, the dusty unused luggage and the safe sitting in the corner.