01. The Ninth Man
The Army is very good at counting.
It counts boots and bullets and body bags. It counts days remaining on a tour down to the hour. It counted 58,220 names onto a black granite wall in Washington, and it counts, still, the 2,646 men it lists as unaccounted for in Southeast Asia. My father is one of them. Sergeant First Class Patrick J. Corrigan, missing since March 14, 1970, somewhere over the border in a country we were not supposed to be in, on a mission that does not officially exist.