😮 I removed the handcuffs from a prisoner and recognized the tattoo of my dead father. He died in Vietnam three months before I was born; I never knew him. 💔 And this 67-year-old man, accused of stealing medicine from a pharmacy, had the same military badge on his arm that my mother has had framed in the living room for forty-eight years.
I remembered the old man’s tattoo. The blurry 3/187 on his arm, exactly like the patch my mom has framed below the photo. The same emblem in two places: on a wall, turned into an altar; on an arm, turned into a curse. The same number. One family prayed to it. The other carried it.
