 There's a moment from many years ago that remains indelible on my mind. I don't remember much on our way there to Waterloo, except that the countryside was strict and blurred, light green over darker green, all under a persistent gray sky. Father drove. My older sister sat next to him and navigated a map on her lap. A pouting teenager, I sat behind with mother who complained of a mild headache and wondered out loud why we needed to find this distant battlefield and why we couldn't go freshen up at our hotel after having just arrived in Belgium. It would be dark by the time we got to Waterloo had we gone to the hotel, Father snapped. I didn't have to turn to know mother was rolling her eyes. If she had a choice, she would have been at the hotel and would not have been stuck in a back seat. As we searched for some pasture where long ago Napoleon was defeated. I thought I saw the sign in French. I said so to Father, except it took me five minutes to get around to doing this. He cursed, called me names in French. I responded in French rather rudely, which surprised him since I rarely spoke the language after we came to America. I felt terrible afterwards and the air in the car was tense. I remember thinking, were we still in the war and I, his coordinate father as a three star general in the South Vietnamese army, no doubt would have me confined to the brink for whatever it was that I said. But it was half a dozen years since the Vietnam War ended and we're already turned into an American family on a European vacation, complete with a soukey teenager stuck in a back seat. And his responsible but equally sullen sister stuck in front while their quarreling parents kept at it. We finally stopped and asked for directions. Father drove frantically after that. We arrived at Waterloo at last and it was still bright out when he, my sister and I rushed up the windswept know that overlooked the battlefield. Mother declined to climb and went to shop to buy souvenirs instead. And as we climbed, Father could barely hide his excitement when we finally stood on top almost out of breath. He began to narrate the story of the old battle. He pointed wildly when Napoleon's army stood, which direction the Prussian soldiers came from and how the Duke of Wellington arrived with his Anglo ally forces to turn the tide, defeating Father's favorite military tactician and ultimately exiling him to St Helena where he died a few years later. But I already knew the story and I also knew that Father was in part trying to make up for the cursing, for cursing at me by telling the old story. It occurred to me that my older brother would have enjoyed this trip far more than me had he come and it of course occurred to me later that we, that never once had Father told any of his children a fairy tale and that most likely he remembered none. But the story of a long ago battle, he had told many times turning our dining room table into the battlefield, our spoons and chopsticks into battalions, bowls into hills. The Duke was drunk, Napoleon was not. What there was nothing he could do was there against fate. My father was second in command at Eichor near the end of the war. He was fighting at the DMZ and nearly lost his life but managed to escape back to Saigon. He boarded a naval ship on the day Saigon fell and headed for Guam. After four years in America and in a remarkable feat, he had remade himself at age 46 into a bank executive. Yet Father's passion remains extraterritorial. Life in America turned out to be, for him and for my mother, a big let down, a reality defined by disappointment and a deep sense of loss. They would never have in America what had been taken from them in Vietnam. For years, the biography of sorts was on display on the mantle in the living room, framed the black and white photos that my brother managed to take with him as a foreign student in the U.S. before the war ended. In one photo, Father is emerging from his helicopter, silver baton in his left hand, his right reaching out to a young army officer who stands with hunched shoulders under the worrying rotor blades that send wind to press down on the elephant grass. In another, mother and father, a beautiful couple would be understating it. She wears a multi-stranded gold bead necklace outside her lavender brocade. She looks stunning and regal. Father on the thin side is dignified and suave in a grey suit, a cigarette in his hand. None of the pictures showed how it all ended. There are plenty of those online under fall of Saigon or April 30th or Vietnam evacuation. Tens of thousands of them, tanks rolling into Saigon, helicopters flying out to awaiting American ships, fear stricken Vietnamese climbing over the barbed wire walls of the U.S. embassy. There are many pictures of refugees in crowded cargo planes landing in the Philippines. And I suppose somewhere there are pictures of me and my mother and sister and two grandmothers emerging from one of those planes with small bags in our hands, looking very, very lost. I remember much of the day we left the wells of a woman, the smell of vomit, night turning into day, then back into night, the humming of a plane's engines, then we landed in Subic Bay. Then there's another flight to Guam, then green tents flapping in the wind, a scorching sun, a very long line for food, adults weeping and screaming as the BBC announces the fall of Saigon. Father left after us on a warship with hundreds of well-placed others for the U.S., Navy base and at Subic Bay and asylum. He folded away his army uniform, changed into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and tossed his gun into the sea. After that, Vietnam, his defeat, his raison d'etre, his crucible was never far from his consciousness. The war his rowing at have become for him the touchstone of his life. He knows wars, studies wars, has read countless books on battle strategies and warfare, and Napoleon is his hero. After so many years of hearing about Napoleon, it should have been exciting seeing the place finally, yet that late summer afternoon I was no longer intrigued. I was homesick for California, I missed my lover terribly, my first love, our tender kisses, the smell of our sweat. I kept replaying our visit to the beach, with the breeze carrying the smell of the ocean and how shy we both were, yet how inextricably drawn we were to one another, the orange-red sunset and the non-finished sand castle between us. All I could think of the entire trip was getting back to California to possess, to love. This was why it had taken me a long time to process that we were going in the wrong direction. It was also why while Father talked on I was miles away. It was only when he himself stopped talking and looked out to the far off distance to where I suppose Napoleon fled that I turned to look to. But I didn't see anything resembling a battlefield. What I saw was a thin great mist drifting lazily over a green pasture below, and in the cold air I smelled a musky odor of newly upturned earth. The pastoral scene at twilight stirred in me no martial passion, but instead poetry and an unspeakable yearning. Father talked on his hair. It was tousled by the wind, his face contemplative. As I watched him, the image came to me suddenly of him on that naval ship near the Philippines. The government of the Philippines wouldn't let the South Vietnamese ship dock unless all personnel turned in their arms. I imagined him his face creased with contemplation as he stared as it gunned for some time before tossing it into the churning sea below. Something, a welling, a sharp pain, rose suddenly within me then, and it surprised me that I hadn't felt anything like it before, and it fell so close to pity. It lodged in my throat and it took some effort not to cry it out loud. There on the windblown hill with the statue of a lion on a pedestal above us, as a memorial for all fallen soldiers. Father seemed so utterly alone, but then suddenly so was I. Frightened and full of my own inarticulate longings, I had to look away for fear that Father might see tears brim in my eyes and think that I too was mourning for Napoleon's defeat. Was it not then that my life turned? Was it not then that I still owned by a collective sense of loss nevertheless took some profound step out from under his shadow? I went on to college in the fall in any case, and then after bouts of bickering with my parents on to my own right in life following my own passion. I've been to Europe a few times since then, to Amsterdam and even to Brussels, and though I think about it, even entertain the idea. Not once did I feel compelled to visit that old battlefield again.