Marisol
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 20
Word came down through Whitcomb three weeks after Quảng Trị that Marisol’s tour would end in May, and for the first time since she’d stepped off the aircraft at Da Nang the better part of a year earlier, she found herself with something she hadn’t expected to feel at all in this country: the strange, unbalanced sensation of an ending arriving before she’d finished deciding what it should mean.
She kept working the vaccination circuit through April, firebase to firebase, the ordinary rhythm of the cover that had carried her through everything else continuing exactly as it had for months, and it was easy, in the day-to-day churn of it, to let the coming rotation stay an abstraction rather than a fact she had to actually sit with. It stopped being an abstraction the afternoon Lan sent word, through the usual careful channels, that the squad wanted to see her one final time before she left.
~ ☆ ~
She arrived in Da Nang two hours early for the meeting, an uncharacteristic slip in her own discipline that she recognized, once she noticed it, as something closer to reluctance than efficiency — a need for time alone in the city before she gave herself over to the goodbye itself.
She walked rather than found transport, through streets that had grown almost familiar to her over eleven months in a way she hadn’t fully registered until she tried to memorize them, knowing she wouldn’t see them again. Market stalls she’d passed dozens of times on the way to resupply runs. A pharmacy with a hand-lettered sign she’d never learned to read but had come to recognize by shape alone. A corner where, months earlier, Oanh had once pointed out a girl selling fruit and told her, with a straight face Marisol still wasn’t entirely sure hadn’t been serious, that the girl worked for her.
The war hadn’t left the city untouched, even here, blocks from anything resembling a front line. Buildings still bore the pockmarks of Tet’s fighting, scaffolding going up in places where reconstruction had finally begun, ordinary life resuming itself in the stubborn, unglamorous way ordinary life always seemed to resume after violence — children playing in a lot still littered with debris, a woman hanging laundry from a balcony with one wall still missing, as though the absence of that wall was simply one more fact of the landscape to be worked around rather than mourned.
Marisol found a place to sit near a small shrine tucked into an alley off the main road, incense burning low in front of photographs of people she’d never know anything about, and she hadn’t been sitting long before an old man tending the shrine’s small collection of offerings noticed her uniform and, after a moment’s visible deliberation, settled onto the low step beside her without asking permission.
He didn’t speak English, and she didn’t have enough Vietnamese to do more than exchange the barest courtesies, so for a long while they simply sat together in the kind of silence that didn’t require translation — an old man who had clearly buried more than one photograph on that small shelf, and a young woman in a foreign uniform who understood, without either of them saying so, that grief looked the same regardless of which side of a war a person had stood on.
Eventually he pointed at one of the photographs, a young man in a faded print, and said something short and unhurried, the tone of it unmistakably a father’s tone even across the gap of language.
“Con trai,” he said again, patting his own chest lightly, then gesturing at the photograph.
My son. She didn’t need the words translated to understand the shape of the sentence.
She thought, unbidden, of Efraín’s letter still folded in her jacket pocket, of the ache in a father’s voice when he spoke about a child he’d nearly lost in more ways than either of them had ever said aloud, and she found herself reaching, without quite deciding to, into her collar for the small rosary she’d taken to wearing beneath her uniform since the week she’d left home — her mother’s, the same one that had sat in a drawer no one opened for most of her childhood, until the morning she’d finally taken it out and put it around her own neck instead, unable to explain to Efraín why she’d needed it with her for this war above all others. She pressed it briefly into the old man’s weathered hand before folding his fingers gently closed around it.
He looked at her for a long moment, something moving behind his eyes that needed no translation either, and pressed it back into her palm instead, shaking his head slowly, the gesture carrying a refusal too dignified to argue with. He held her hand a moment longer than the exchange strictly required, patted it once, and returned his attention to the shrine, to his son’s photograph, to whatever private accounting a father makes with grief he never fully finishes making.
She sat with him another quarter hour before rising, the incense burned down to nothing between them, and neither of them said another word that needed saying. Whatever she carried out of that alley wasn’t absolution — she hadn’t come looking for any, and wouldn’t have believed it if it had been offered — but something quieter and more useful than absolution: the plain, wordless fact that a war which had asked her to become exactly what her father built her to be had also, somehow, left room enough for a stranger’s grief to sit beside her own without either canceling the other out.
~ ☆ ~
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.