Author name: Jenny Ng

PART 1 – THE BRIDGE They took my badge because I refused to let a war hero die on camera, even after my own chief said, “If he wants to jump, let him jump.”I didn’t lose my career in a shootout or a scandal, I lost it on a wet Tuesday night talking a shaking […]

Part 1 – The Last Mission On the hottest day our town had seen in fifty years, a seventy-two-year-old veteran kicked open a supermarket bathroom door and walked out cradling a dying baby, saying he was going back to war one last time. I was just there for cheap gas and an iced coffee, but

Part 1: The Parking Lot Ultimatum “Choose, Em: your soldier father or me,” Ryan said as my daughter shoved my war medals into my hands. I came to drop off a teddy bear; instead I watched my child decide I was who had to go. My name is Jack Miller. Twenty years ago strangers shook

The day a silent eight-year-old girl sprinted across a crowded superstore to throw herself into the arms of the angriest-looking veteran in the room was the day I stopped believing in first impressions. Part 1: The Silent Girl and the Broken Soldier I noticed him because everyone else avoided him. He was huge in a

Part 1 – The Lunch Card on the Table I was halfway through my second cup of bad diner coffee when a little girl climbed into my booth, slid a worn-out school lunch card and two dented dog tags across the table, and stared me down like a tiny attorney.By the time she asked if

Part 1 – The Day Twenty-One Fathers Were Born Twenty-one veterans in mismatched suits and scuffed dress shoes stood behind a pregnant widow at a military funeral, and somewhere between the folded flag and the three-gun salute, they silently decided to become the father her child would never meet. None of them walked into that

PART 1 – THE NIGHT WE WENT BACK TO WAR The night I heard a child whisper, “Please don’t send me back there,” was the night a handful of broken old soldiers went to war again, without uniforms, rank, or orders. I was just trying to drink my coffee and forget the last war I’d

Part 1 – The Call I Let Go to Voicemail The night my veteran father died alone in an emergency room, a nurse asked if I wanted to come say goodbye, and I said no, because I’d already buried him in my heart years earlier. I hung up before she could say the word “sorry.”

Part 1 – Left in the Waiting Room The last time my son said, “I’ll be right back,” he left me in a hospital waiting room with a plastic bracelet cutting into my thin wrist and no intention of ever returning. The man who finally came for me wasn’t family, but he knew my dead

Part 1 – The Boy in the Wheelchair and the Veteran in the Parking Lot They say this country loves its veterans, but on Memorial Day morning I watched a boy in a wheelchair beg men wearing “veteran” caps to help his dying grandfather, and every single one of them walked away. For about five