September 1967 - Burbank, California
Tommy's apartment was on the third floor of a building two miles from the Hawkey plant. One bedroom, small kitchen, living room with a view of the parking lot. Rent was $120 a month—expensive, but manageable on his starting salary.
He furnished it simply. Bed from a secondhand store. Desk from Sears. Bookshelf he built himself from lumber and brackets. A radio. No television—couldn't afford one yet, and didn't really need it.
The apartment was just a place to sleep. His real life was at Hawkey.
Tommy would wake at six, arrive at the plant by seven. Work until six or seven PM most nights, sometimes later. Come home exhausted, eat something quick, study technical manuals, sleep.
Repeat.
It was exactly what he wanted. Purpose. Structure. Building something real.
No time to think about fathers or vaults or keys in closet boxes.
October 1967
The TriStar was behind schedule.
Tommy learned this quickly. Hawkey had promised delivery to airlines by 1971, but the development was plagued with problems. Engine issues. Weight problems. Cost overruns.
Gerald Price was under constant pressure, which meant everyone under him was under pressure.
"Forsyth, we need those wing stress calculations redone. New engine configuration changes the load distribution."
"Yes, sir. When do you need them?"
"Yesterday."
Tommy worked through the weekend. Recalculated everything. Delivered Monday morning.
Price reviewed them, nodded. "Good work. But we have another problem. Fuselage structural analysis doesn't match wind tunnel data. Need you to figure out why."
Tommy dove into that problem. Found the discrepancy—a calculation error in the original modeling. Fixed it. Delivered the correction.
Price looked at him with something approaching respect. "You're fast. And accurate. That's rare."
"Thank you, sir."
"How'd you like to move to a special projects team? Small group, working on advanced concepts. More interesting than production stress calculations."
Tommy hesitated. Special projects sounded... vague. Potentially classified. He'd specifically avoided applying to defense programs. Wanted commercial work. Clean. Transparent.
"What kind of projects?" Tommy asked.
"Can't say much without clearance. But interesting work. Cutting edge." Price studied him. "You're smart, Forsyth. Too smart to spend your career checking other people's math. This would be a real opportunity."
"I'll think about it."
"Don't think too long. Spots are limited."
November 1967
Tommy met Linda Chen at a company social event.
Hawkey held monthly gatherings for younger employees—awkward mixers in the cafeteria with cheap wine and cheese cubes. Tommy usually avoided them, but his coworker dragged him to one.
"You can't just work all the time, Forsyth. You need to meet people."
"I meet people at work."
"I mean people who aren't engineers arguing about lift coefficients."
So Tommy went. Stood awkwardly in the corner, drinking bad wine, watching other people socialize.
That's when Linda approached.
"You look thrilled to be here," she said.
Tommy looked at her. Pretty, mid-twenties, dark hair pulled back, wearing a professional dress that suggested she'd come straight from an office somewhere.
"That obvious?" Tommy asked.
"You've been standing in the exact same spot for twenty minutes, looking like you're calculating escape routes." She smiled. "I'm Linda. I don't work here. My brother does. He dragged me along because apparently I also need to 'meet people.'"
"Tommy. I work here. My coworker dragged me for the same reason."
"Well, now we've met people. Can we leave?"
Tommy laughed despite himself. "I don't think it works that way."
"Worth a try." Linda sipped her wine, made a face. "This is terrible."
"It really is."
They talked for an hour. Linda was an architecture student at USC, finishing her master's degree. Smart, funny, grounded. She asked about his work—Tommy explained aerospace engineering in terms that didn't require a PhD to understand.
"So you make planes?"
"Technically I calculate whether planes will fall apart."
"That seems important."
"It's very boring."
"I calculate whether buildings will fall down. Also very boring. But important."
At the end of the evening, Linda wrote her number on a napkin. "Call me if you want to get coffee sometime. Somewhere with better wine."
Tommy pocketed the napkin. "I'll do that."
He called her three days later.
December 1967
Their first official date was at a coffee shop near USC.
Tommy was nervous—hadn't dated much in college, too focused on studies. But Linda was easy to talk to. Asked questions. Actually listened to answers.
"So why aerospace?" she asked.
"I like things that are real. Quantifiable. Build a wing, test it, know if it works." Tommy stirred his coffee. "Nothing ambiguous. No mysteries. Just math and physics and results you can measure."
"You don't like mysteries?"
"I like problems with clear solutions."
Linda studied him. "That's a very engineering answer. What about in life? Life's pretty ambiguous most of the time."
Tommy thought about that. About fathers who died with secrets. About keys in closets. About questions without clear answers.
"I'm trying to keep life unambiguous too," he said.
"Good luck with that." But she smiled when she said it.
They saw each other twice a week after that. Coffee, dinner, walks around campus. Linda was practical, grounded, uninterested in drama. She had plans—finish her degree, get a job at a good firm, design buildings that mattered.
"What about you?" she asked one night over dinner. "Long-term plans?"
"Build aircraft. Get promoted. Be good at what I do."
"That's it? Just work?"
Tommy shrugged. "What else is there?"
"Family? House? Life outside the office?"
"Maybe eventually. Right now I'm focused on career."
Linda nodded. "I get that. Me too. But eventually... eventually we probably need more than just work."
"Eventually," Tommy agreed.
But he wasn't thinking about eventually. He was thinking about now. About building something solid and real and unambiguous.
About being nothing like his father.
March 1968
The Tet Offensive dominated the news.
Tommy heard about it at work—radios playing, people gathered around, discussing the surprise attacks across South Vietnam. Saigon embassy breached. Hue under siege. American forces caught off guard.
"Thought we were winning," someone said.
"Apparently not."
Tommy listened but didn't engage. Vietnam wasn't his concern. He'd gotten a student deferment through college, then his draft number had been high enough that he wasn't called. Lucky. Some guys from Berkeley had gone. Some hadn't come back.
But Tommy had stayed. Finished his degree. Started his career.
Serving his country by building aircraft, not carrying rifles.
That evening, he met Linda for dinner. She was upset.
"My cousin was at Hue. We haven't heard from him in two weeks."
"I'm sorry."
"This war is a mistake. We shouldn't be there." She looked at Tommy. "Do you think we should be there?"
Tommy hesitated. Politics wasn't something he'd thought much about. He'd been too busy with studies, then work.
"I don't know," he admitted. "It's complicated."
"It's not complicated. It's wrong. We're in a country that doesn't want us, fighting a war we can't win, losing boys for... for what?" Linda's eyes were wet. "My cousin is nineteen, Tommy. Nineteen. He should be in college, not dodging bullets in some jungle."
Tommy didn't know what to say. So he took her hand, held it, let her cry.
Later, walking her to her car, Linda said: "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have unloaded on you."
"It's okay."
"It's just... when I see the news, I keep thinking: somebody planned this. Somebody decided to send all these boys over there. And for what? What are we even accomplishing?"
Tommy thought about his father's letter. Vietnam: they planned it in 1944.
No. That was insane. Vietnam was complicated geopolitics, Cold War strategy, domino theory. Not some conspiracy planned decades in advance.
"I don't know what we're accomplishing," Tommy said honestly. "But I'm sure the people making decisions have reasons."
"Do they? Or are they just afraid to admit they made a mistake?"
Tommy didn't have an answer for that.