The Price — Stephen Wright

A middle aged father has a secret. His son was raised to believe his dad served honorably in the Army as a Military Policeman in Vietnam. Now his son is 18 years old, and it is time to tell him the truth about how his dad had spent a year in Canada as a draft resistor before finally succumbing to the draft and serving in Vietnam. The father had struggled with how to explain his actions since the day a family member “spilled the beans” about his days as a “draft dodger” in Canada several years ago. Back then he promised to explain it all to his son when he turned 18. Now that his son turned 18, it is time to keep his promise and try and explain the sequence of events that led to his decision to go to Canada and then return to the USA to face the consequences of resisting the draft. The father hoped his explanation would help his son understand the world better and not make some of the same mistakes he had made. Moreover, his son had always been a responsible young man and the father did not want this to change. He was concerned that somehow, the “sins of the father might be visited on the son” by revealing the truth about his past. The father spends months preparing himself and then tells the story to his son while they are visiting his old Army buddy and taking a skiing vacation in Vermont. The story he tells traces the major events in the father's life from the time when the brother of a close neighborhood friend was killed in Vietnam in 1965 to the time when the father was released from the Army in 1973. The son takes it all in, but the father has no way of knowing what impact, if any, his story will ultimately have on his son.