She said the plot beneath that headstone had never been opened, and that in 1996 my platoon sergeant had been declared killed in action based on a body recovered too damaged for standard identification, matched instead to dog tags and a blood type that turned out, on paper eight years later, to belong to two different men. Nobody caught it at the time. The war was hot enough and the paperwork was fast enough that a mismatch like that could slide through, get stamped, get buried, get saluted over every April for twenty-eight years by a man who still couldn’t pronounce the name of the town where it happened. She said the file had sat flagged but unresolved since a records digitization project in 2004, waiting for someone with the authority and the reason to actually open it.
I asked her the only question that mattered, which was whether that meant Vance might not be in the ground at all. She said she couldn’t promise me an answer, only a process — exhumation, DNA comparison against a sample from a cousin they’d already located in Ohio, six to eight months if the lab wasn’t backed up. I stood there with an unopened beer in my hand, twenty-eight years of ritual suddenly sitting on top of a question I’d never once thought to ask, and realized I didn’t know which outcome I was hoping for. If it was him, I’d spent nearly three decades doing exactly what I was supposed to. If it wasn’t, I owed somebody’s family twenty-eight years of pouring beer onto a stranger’s grave, and Vance was still out there — or gone somewhere else entirely, unaccounted for in a different way.
The results came back in November. It was him. Whatever mismatch had happened with the dog tags never touched the ground itself — the file was a records error, not a body swap, the county woman told me almost apologetically, like she’d hoped for my sake it would turn out to be more than paperwork. I went back this April anyway, poured the beer he’d have called a waste, and told him about the year he spent, for me at least, possibly not dead. He’d have laughed at that. He’d have said I owed him for the confusion, same as I owed him for the ditch, and he’d have been right about that too.
