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Let me get back to my point, which is that my dad, Jimmy, was one of so many young men who went to Vietnam. He was drafted in 1965 and served four or five tours. Unlike a lot of his friends who went alongside him, he managed to make it back in one piece, physically at least. But just like other survivors, he was torn to pieces inside by what he'd seen and what he'd had to do to survive. My dad was taken from me when I was a teenager, so I didn't get the chance to speak to him man to man about what he lived through, but I got a sense of it from the stories he told.

He tried to always end those stories with something cheerful, because that was the way he looked at life, but you could hear the hardship through it anyway. When my dad would tell me about hard days and sleepless nights in the jungle, he'd spend more time talking about his friends telling jokes and singing Motown songs to get through it together. But one time when I was in high school, he sat me down and really leveled with me. He told me that he'd been a helicopter gunner and that countless times he killed people that he didn't know. He'd watch them fall to the ground hundreds of feet below him every time he pulled that trigger.

"It was war," he said to me, without a smile on his face. "It was bloody."

He got real quiet and I couldn't think of anything to say. He was my hero, and I was just trying to picture him, not much older than I was at the time, in a helicopter above a jungle, leaning out the door shooting people every day, just to stay alive.

"I never told you who you're named after, did I, Tray?"

That wasn't what I was expecting to hear. "No, Dad. You and Mom said you just liked the way it sounded."

"Well, we did, but there's more to it," he said.

Excerpted from I Am the New Black by Tracy Morgan, with Anthony Bozza. Copyright © 2009 by Tracy Morgan. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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