My name is Ronald Simuwen.

At the age of 38 I suddenly found myself alone in the world.

When I saw on Facebook that a cousin of mine had died, I had no relatives left, not one.

I decided to hire a genealogy service to learn more about a couple of people I didn't

know much about.

The one who interested me most was an uncle I'd never met, uncle Andrew.

He'd done two tours in Vietnam and was discharged, but he died even before the last of the American

troops were pulled out.

The service found out that it had been a suicide, which I hadn't known.

And they even gave me a short list of living men who had apparently served in his last unit.

I decided to write them all, just to learn more, as I was managing to accomplish with

some other relatives.

One of the men wrote me back and he even said I could drive up to see him if I wanted

to hear about Andrew.

So when we came, I made the three hour trip up to Keating and met this guy named Porter.

He lived alone in a small dirty house at a long white beard.

His emails were kind of tourists and not written very well.

And in person he was a little cold, like maybe he'd changed his mind and I was intruding

on him.

Almost the first thing he did was take me down to his basement.

And there was something there that was kind of hideous.

At first I thought it was a big model train set.

...