Combat duty during the Viet Nam conflict separates two lovers prematurely.

"Come to me Michael," she said in the darkness.

As if they were the words of an angel, those four words haunted me for the next forty years of my life. Later, whenever I thought of her and in all the years that I couldn't find her, her voice resonated in my head as if she was a ghost.

"Come to me Michael," played on and on as if an endless echo in my mind.

As if she was calling me from afar and as if she wanted me to come to her now in the way that I...