Growing up I was certain I wouldn’t live to be twenty. The name given me had come with a deadline. An expiration date. It would happen one Halloween. I was sure of it. Or a few days before.

I was named for an uncle who was killed in Vietnam three days before his twentieth birthday. Any time you might be surprised I wanted to see how strong the lure my name on a tombstone like slipping I only needed over an abyss’ edge to drive to the family cemetery or driving into in rural east Texas an oncoming truck and visit his grave. An impossible pre-facsimile of something that hadn’t happened yet. And yet was right there in front of me.

Now, too, thanks entirely to Maya Lin, I have a collection of our name—rubbings from not only the memorial wall in Washington, DC, but from the several Vietnam Veterans Memorial knock-offs as well. Friends visit these memorials and bring back photos and their own rubbings. Like ever proliferating Holocaust museums across America, and just as useful, you can search “Vietnam memorials near me” and hit a couple in an afternoon. Public art, like patriotism, is a travesty at the expense of private lives. But when you visit The Wall, please do pause and trace your finger over our name. Panel 3E Line 1.

When I see my name etched in marble or granite, I remember the stories told by my family of my uncle’s closed-casket funeral: a box of body parts and my grandmother clawing at the lid. When I die, I want to be anonymous, with no memorials—only pure spirit.

Public art, like patriotism, is a travesty at the expense of private lives.

A common scene: startled awake twice in a matter of hours. My first nightmare: the black black telephone at my grandparents’ house. Endlessly ringing with a call announcing death. Two aunts, still at home. Still young. Dancing ’round. Sternly hushed as the television volume was lowered on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was October 31, 1965. A Sunday evening. There is nothing more banal than mentioning the day of the week.

The second nightmare: a Jeep ride deep in the jungle. With my uncle. South Vietnam. But then a flash, a crash, an explosion, crippling the scene in grainy Zapruder slow-motion.

Another scene: it’s again Halloween 1965. From Indochina, news takes three days to reach my grandparents’ farm. I see my grandmother baking a vanilla cake with white coconut frosting. It was the day my uncle was turning was to have turned twenty.

Some of my earliest memories are false. When children aren’t given answers, they’ll create their own. There was no “box of body parts.” No telephone call. No Jeep ride through the jungles. And most likely no vanilla cake with shaggy shredded coconut. At least not on that specific day. But those phrases and images kept me company throughout my childhood. The part about my grandmother scratching at the casket to open it, though, is, I am told, true.

My grandmother looms largest when I think about my uncle. What she lost and how she managed to live through it. Her youngest son. With a name that, after years of genealogical research, appears to have come from nowhere and most likely will end with me. His death rewired all of us to such an extent that despite being born a few years after, some of my earliest memories of recurring nightmares are about his death. How to explain to the neurologist that I think my lifelong insomnia is somehow connected to those nightmares based on false memories of an uncle I never met, who died before I was born? When I read in the Bible how God curses generations, how He visits “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children,” I already knew this to be true.

The injustice of my uncle’s death is a much more banal truth, though, and it’s something that only over the last few decades has come to be more fleshed out and less a product of my morbid childhood imagination: it was quite literally an accident. A “car crash,” if you will. It just happened to have happened in Vietnam during a war. And while there seems to have been some small arms gunfire nearby and afterwards, even this piece of information seems trite and meaningless.

My uncle’s entire life has been relegated to a footnote in history. But not even. At least a footnote offers an explanation, a source. But nothing. Bits and pieces appear online. “Non-hostile, died of other causes.” After only forty-one nights under a southeast Asian moon. His entire service record condensed to a few words: A Company, 15th Medical Battalion. Clerk-typist (airborne-qualified). Another web site: “Died through non-hostile action … vehicle crash.” Yet another web site: “Casualty codes: C1-C-7. C1 = Non-hostile, died outright from other causes. C = Vehicle loss or crash. 7 = Ground casualty.” A euphemism: “Mule turned….” Something you might’ve instead heard on the farm, except here mule refers to an M274 ½-ton 4×4 utility platform truck. More unsatisfying trivia to keep me awake at night.

So no, no Jeep. And no call on my grandparents’ black black telephone by a government bureaucrat. Those truths, too, are also much more banal. The military did send someone to tell them in person. And it does appear that that just happened to have happened god have mercy on what would’ve been my uncle’s twentieth birthday.

My uncle’s entire life has been relegated to a footnote in history. But not even. At least a footnote offers an explanation, a source.

In Season 10 Episode 13 of the American television series M*A*S*H, intrepid war correspondent Clayton Kibbee visits the 4077 with a case containing six pints of blood from donors back home in the States. He will be reporting on how the blood gets distributed among the heroes in Korea. Kibbee is less a thinly-veiled Ernest Hemingway type and more a carbon copy. Female nurses swoon in his presence. The men, including the wounded soldiers at the MASH unit, know him from his valiant and, it is revealed later, exaggerated tales from the front.

The first recipient is a soldier injured from falling off a motorcycle. The second, wounded while using grenades to fish. But in Kibbee’s report, these men are transformed into lionhearted warriors rescuing their comrades-in-arms under heavy fire from the enemy. These stories sell newspapers and inspire young men to enlist. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle that Hawkeye intends to put a stop to. No more romanticized, sensationalized war propaganda. Tell the people back home the truth.

Though M*A*S*H was set during the Korean War (1950-1953), the fact that it aired from 1972 to 1983 means that it was very much suffused with the ethos of Vietnam. The accidents portrayed in this episode remain some of the closest, most accurate representations of my uncle’s time in the army and of his service in Vietnam. Forty-one goddamned nights. But perhaps that just means he didn’t have much of a chance to kill any Vietnamese or commit war crimes. Can I write such a sentence without sounding glib and disrespectful? But how does one write about an accident that is both trivial and tragic? And how is a family, or a nation, supposed to ever properly process, carry on, and recover? I’ve been asking various versions of these questions my entire life and I’m no nearer an answer. It’s why I don’t much believe in “smart” bombs and “smart” ground munitions and other “intelligent” weapons of war. Accidents always happen. On and off the battlefield. And they will be no less devastating to those left behind.

In a small town, in a rural community, everyone already knows your business. That’s particularly true if your business is in the least bit scandalous. And you better believe that death fits that bill. It seems the people tasked with delivering bad news in rural Texas that late October had to stop at the one nearby gas station to ask for directions. By the time they put their official automobile in reverse, news had already spread. I imagine my grandparents not even having the time to process the information before neighbors started to call and show up with consolatory casseroles. But maybe that’s just another more nuanced false memory in the making.

Similarly, and still today, unhinged Americans come out every Veterans Day and Memorial Day. The Fourth of July even. Those who call him a “hero” and effusively “salute his sacrifice.” They write things like, “The youth of today could gain much by learning of heroes such as yourself, men and women whose courage and heart can never be questioned.” Or “I pray that there are more brave servicemen like you to fight and give for their homeland.” Or “May his positive example inspire us.” In other words, the world’s appetite for dead teenagers hasn’t yet been sated. Clayton Kibbee would be so proud.

High school history classes and individual students write reports on him. They used to contact my grandmother when she was still alive. In these reports they address him as “Frank” as if they were friends or colleagues. At least the people in rural Texas actually knew him. For the teachers, it’s just easier, I guess, to glorify a dead teenager than to teach critical thinking. Maybe my grandmother didn’t mind such intrusions into such personal and private grief. The students, to my knowledge, never wrote about her, though. The one who spent the remainder of her life making sure that no grass ever grew on his grave. A practice she kept until her own death in 1993. (When she died, one of the first and most important family decisions to be made was whether we would continue this tradition or allow nature to run its course.) I wonder if any of these earnest students ever offered to mow her lawn or fix her fence or ask her about anything other than her dead son.

But how does one write about an accident that is both trivial and tragic?

Thankfully, the name on the tombstone and on all those memorials across the United States has only my uncle’s middle initial. Because on all those official documents and commendations, the ones that sat atop the old piano at my grandparents’ house, those that included his middle name, a name that’s entirely his and that I do not share, is a typo. A bureaucratic error, an administrative misprint that has lasted longer than the boy was alive.

My uncle’s middle name was Davis but the government, the military, only ever had David. Regrettably, Davis shows up as a family name, specifically a middle name, in the early 1860s. (Jefferson Davis was the president of the treasonous Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865.) There is no record of the name David in our family.

If something so mundane and inconsequential can endure, are there graver mistakes we don’t know? Or are we just seeing governmental and military ineptitude that shows itself more powerful a force than life itself? And what is this logic that required a closed casket? You see, I have some questions still. But when adults aren’t given answers, their only option is to make do.

All this to say, I don’t question my uncle’s heroism. Unlike President Bone Spurs and other artless dodgers who avoided military service in the 1960s, my uncle volunteered to serve. He was not drafted. He had wanted to be a teacher, I think of mathematics, and he knew that the military was one of the very few routes out of rural poverty. So he followed down the same path his three older brothers had trod. It just didn’t work out.

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Writer and translator Frank Garrett shops in Dallas, Texas, and is essays editor at Minor Literature[s]. His series Better Shopping Through Living will appear monthly. His entire life has been a haunting.