NOTHING FURTHER TO REPORT

On December 1, 1969, the whole country watched a man draw blue capsules out of a glass jar. Beto Garza's birthday came out eleventh.

Beto is nineteen. He works the cotton gin in San Benito, Texas, and he has loved María Delgado since they were sixteen. Ten weeks after the lottery they are married in a judge's front room while a canary sings. Nine days after that, he is on a bus to Fort Polk. By summer he is a radio operator with the 101st Airborne on a red-dirt firebase in the hills west of Hue, and María is writing to tell him the baby kicks.

Beto is good on the radio. His voice never shakes. He calls in the helicopters, the artillery, the coordinates that bring men home. And every letter he sends María ends the same way: Nothing further to report.

It is never true. Below the firebase is a hamlet where a girl named Lan trades eggs for canned peaches and an old farmer asks when the Americans will give back his rice. There is a foggy December morning, a machine gun, two men pinned on a dike, and a captain who says bring it in. There is a number Beto has two seconds to choose, and the rest of his life to answer for.

When he finally comes home, his son screams at the sight of him, his wife has built a life of her own, and the war will not stay where he keeps it. María can read every word he leaves out. The question is whether he will ever say them out loud.

Nothing Further to Report follows a Mexican American family in the Rio Grande Valley from the 1969 draft lottery to 1973. It is a novel about the men who came home and the women who read between the lines, about marriage and fatherhood, and about what we owe the people whose names we never learned.