That summer, my mother and I were living with my Grandmother in Honolulu while Dad was with the army fighting the war in Vietnam. At least, that’s what I told all the kids in the neighborhood. The truth was that he was stationed in Thailand, working a noncombat position maintaining a communications infrastructure for the Air Force and its pilots. He had only recently been commissioned—one of the Air Force’s “30-day Wonders” who had been rushed through Officer Training School in 30 days rather than the usual 90—and shipped off to Southeast Asia to fill the vacuum in the Line Officer hierarchy. I could have boasted of the intelligence that allowed him to work in the heavily abstract and highly mathematical field of electronic communications; I should have been proud of his sense of duty and patriotism that drove him to volunteer and serve during the entire conflict. Instead I repeated my lie when needed and remained quiet when a drafted brother or uncle came back full of rage at their “greenhorn lieutenants” or the “zoomies who didn’t know what it really meant to fight a war.”
I was happy living with Grandma, not only because as her only grandson, I was indulged in ways that baffled my mother and rendered unrecognizable the strict disciplinarian who had raised her, but also because Muliwai Lane seemed a world away from Hickam Air Base, where everyone—the teachers, the grown-ups, even the other kids—could talk only about the war. On Muliwai Lane, I could take off my silver P.O.W. bracelet without guilt, bury it in a corner of my sock drawer, and go outside to find some adventures with my new best friend, Patrick.
Patrick was the same age as I was, and at 13, we ruled the lane. It was our last year in power—we would be entering high school that fall—and if Joy and the others before us were any indication, as soon as we entered McKinley High, we would stop associating with the younger kids and start worrying about records, clothes, and our hair. Because Patrick was Grandma’s neighbor, I had known him all my life, but it wasn’t until I actually moved in that we became fast friends. As a young child, Patrick was often absent or bed-bound, a victim of an aggressive and insidious form of leukemia that seemed to roar up every few years only to be battered into a seething remission by increasingly larger doses of radiation, drugs, and luck. His frailty, coupled with my grandmother’s constant and graphic updates, had rendered Patrick into something other than a kid like myself. He became an observable process of pity and fear, like a maimed insect flailing in a glass jar.
But I soon learned it was everyone else who projected these things onto Patrick, for he himself saw strengths where others saw weaknesses: His physical weakness meant that his brain was stronger. He did not live a life punctuated by sadness and sickness, but lived for the ever increasing pursuit of fun. And the pity that was shown to him by grown-ups was just a propaganda tool to keep kids thinking about themselves, and not thinking about creating the kinds of mischief that Patrick was famous for: placing Grandma’s plastic fruit centerpiece in the freezer and putting the frozen strawberries in the back of the cupboard so that a month later Grandma discovered it by the trail of ants that were traversing in and out of her cabinets. Even after she permanently banned Patrick from her house, he told me, “You know, I think deep down she really enjoys it.” In short, he was the perfect companion for a 13-year-old boy looking to ignore the names, numbers, and funerals of war.
The only times the war was unavoidable were the infrequent phone calls from my father in Thailand. The calls were a kind of theatrical performance on both sides: He with his false gaiety and “no worries” prattling that belied his true nature, cautious and responsible, and me under strict maternal orders that the best thing a soldier’s son could do was cause no worries for his father. Everything that came out of my mouth that summer was either a lie, half-lie, or omission. So when he asked about my team, the baseball team that he had coached every season before the war, I made up statistics for nonexistent players and asked for his advice on my slumping batting average instead of telling him that his absence had sent the team into disarray and eventual abandonment. Soon we would both run out of things to lie about, and he would end by telling me to be good and more helpful to my mother since I was “the only man around the house.” It was at that moment I would be tempted to mention the man who lived in Grandma’s backyard. 
