Sunday, July 21, 2013

A Curious Confluence Afterward: Daughter’s Initial Comments

So perhaps you can see why I believed that the 50% certain identification of what was found in the river was my father. He was, after all, certainly gone. And the Paris Police and FBI must know what they are doing. And United States Air Force records don’t lie, I suppose.

50% seemed good.

Such was my rationale supported by his story just completed.

But it turned out that the preceding page wasn’t the end of it.

In addition to the computer-resident story which I have given you, I also came into possession of that journal – the journal from which he extracted so many pieces of the story just presented.

It was a journal that he started writing when he was in Saigon in what he called “the war effort”. He always uttered that term with an ironic twitch of his mouth and a sort of drawled snideness. The “war effort” was the euphemism that had been assigned by many to that debacle known more officially as the Vietnam War. My father was a contributor in 1966 and 1967 to the “war effort”.

The things that he found in that journal 40 years later that fit neatly into the rest of the experiences he was having- or thought he was having - in Paris in 2010 and included in his blog posts are really the backbone of the tale just told.

But that turns out to be a backbone that was missing its ribs.

I have read the journal and have discovered many of those ribs.

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