And beneath it, worn but still legible, were the numbers that made my entire body go cold:
3/187.
For a second, the courtroom disappeared. The judge’s voice vanished. The scraping of chairs, the hum of fluorescent lights, the rattle of paperwork—it all dropped away into silence.
All I could see was that tattoo.
3rd Battalion. 187th Infantry Regiment.
My father’s unit.
Vietnam. 1969.
My father, David Johnson, died in combat three months before I was born. I never met him.
I grew up with a framed photograph in my mother’s living room of a young man in uniform smiling at the camera, too young to understand that history had already chosen him. Beneath that photograph sat the patch my mother kept like a sacred relic.
The same eagle.
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