The Price of Freedom

Kirk McGinty loves everything about soldiering. While his history class drones on around him, he is somewhere else entirely, crouched in a daydream jungle where a brave officer named Captain McGinty takes out an enemy bunker single-handed and walks out of the smoke alive. The cheering in his head is so loud that he does not hear his teacher calling his name.

Mr. Altman has read Kirk's report on the Vietnam War, and he is not impressed. Most of the facts are wrong, he says, and the country never should have been there in the first place. When Kirk asks what that means for the soldiers who fought, Mr. Altman gives him an answer that lands like a stone: they died for nothing. Then he hands Kirk a book called Vietnam, the Real Story and tells him that some of those soldiers were killers.

Kirk carries the book home and cannot put it down, even though every page hurts. He reads about a lieutenant convicted of terrible crimes and tells himself that his own father would never have done such a thing. When his Boy Scout friends ambush him in the yard to practice the battle reenactment they are supposed to perform at the town's Memorial Day picnic, Kirk announces he is quitting. The whole thing was his idea, his friends protest. Leo pushes further and jokes that maybe Kirk has discovered his dad was not such a hero after all, and the two boys end up shoving each other before Kirk storms off, leaving the book behind in the grass.

At Whit's End, John Avery Whittaker and Connie Kendall have just finished stacking six hundred gallons of ice cream for the picnic when the boys come in with Kirk's book and the story of what happened. Whit reads the title, asks a few careful questions, and then tells Connie the thing the whole town seems to know except her. Kirk's father died in Vietnam.

That night Kirk asks his mother, Joyce, to tell the story one more time. She describes Saigon in April of 1975, the embassy where she worked as secretary to a newly promoted Marine captain named Steve McGinty, and the wedding they had there. When the evacuation came, Steve stayed behind and sent her ahead. The last thing she saw from her helicopter was her husband on the pad, lifting a Vietnamese woman and her baby aboard, holding the baby a long moment before handing it back. She never got to tell him a son was on the way, though she has always believed he somehow knew. Kirk falls asleep and dreams of accusing voices, of a courtroom verdict with his father's name in it, and of Steve himself pushing him toward a helicopter and saying he loves him.

Whit pays a visit to Mr. Altman, who insists he does not have to explain his teaching to anyone. But the conversation softens when Altman speaks of his brother Eric, an artist who talked about honor and duty and was killed in a raid into Cambodia. That waste is exactly why he refuses to let Kirk keep his dreams of battlefield glory. Whit answers gently that at least Altman had years with his brother. Kirk's father died before Kirk was born, and the image the boy carries is the only father he has ever had. Tearing it down, Whit warns, would cost more than the teacher realizes.

Memorial Day arrives with a picnic, applause for Troop 7-11's Battle of Gettysburg, and a wandering water sprinkler. Then comes the unveiling of the Odyssey Veterans Monument, and Joyce and Kirk are called up to do the honors. Kirk is too full of feeling to speak, so Joyce reads from one of her husband's last letters. Steve wrote that hard and true things would be said about the war, that he would not excuse the inexcusable, and that if the people back home could hear the gratitude of the Vietnamese they had helped, they might understand a little better. That, he wrote, is what makes the price of freedom worth paying, and if he ever had a son, that is what he would want to tell him.

Kirk cuts the ribbon. Afterward, he apologizes to his mother for how he has been acting, and she tells him that testing what he believes is part of growing up. She is only sorry that his father had to be the first test. Mr. Altman appears at the picnic too, admits that teachers sometimes push so hard they say things they should not, and offers Kirk an apology of his own. Kirk accepts it easily.

Two names on the new monument have caught Altman's eye. One is Eric Altman, which puzzles him, since his brother never lived in Odyssey. He asks that whoever put it there be thanked, and Whit quietly promises the message will be passed along. The other name is Jerry Whittaker. Altman asks whether the man was a relative, and Whit tells him the truth: Jerry was his son. It never gets any easier, the two men agree, and that is exactly what makes a day like this one matter.