Proof of Heaven

gave him license to uncover my adoptive identity. But Richard was too
much of a gentleman to go back on the adoption agreement made in 1954,
and he kept out of the matter. In the early 1970s, with the war in Vietnam
still raging, Ann couldn’t get the date of my birth out of her head. I would
turn nineteen in December 1972. Would I go over? If so, what would
become of me there? Early on, my plan was to enlist in the marines to fly.
My vision was 20/100, and the Air Force required 20/20 without
correction. Word on the street was that the marines would take even those
of us with 20/100 vision and teach us to fly. However, they then started
winding down the Vietnam war effort, so I never enlisted. I headed off to
med school instead. But Ann knew none of this. In the spring of 1973,
they watched as surviving POWs from the “Hanoi Hilton” disembarked
from the planes returning from North Vietnam. They were heartbroken
when missing pilots they knew, more than half of Richard’s navy class,
failed to emerge from the planes, and Ann got it in her head that I might
have been killed over there myself.
Once in her mind the image refused to fade, and for years she was
convinced that I’d died a grisly death in the rice paddies of Vietnam. She
certainly would have been surprised to know that at that time I was just a
few miles away from her in Chapel Hill!
In the summer of 2008, I met up with my biological father, his brother
Bob, and his brother-in-law, also named Bob, at Litchfield Beach, South
Carolina. Brother Bob was a decorated hero in the navy during the Korean
War and a test pilot at China Lake (the navy’s weapons test center in the
California desert, where he perfected the Sidewinder missile system and
flew F-104 Starfighters). Meanwhile Richard’s brother-in-law Bob set a
speed record during Operation Sun Run in 1957, a circumglobal relay
record in F-101 Voodoo jet fighters “outflying the sun” by circling the
earth at an average speed of over 1,000 miles per hour.
It felt like Old Home Week for me.
Those meetings with my birth parents heralded the end of what I’ve
come to think of as my Years of Not Knowing. Years that, I came at last
to learn, had been characterized by the same terrible pain for my
birthparents as they had been for me.