Chor Xiong pulled a worn black wallet from his back pocket Friday night and extracted two photographs. One showed his 18-year-old son, Nelson Xiong, stoic in a dress blue military uniform. The other showed his stern-faced oldest son, 23-year-old Kham Xiong, in camouflage fatigues.
Chor has been worried about Nelson, who is fighting in Afghanistan and due back in Minnesota on Nov. 28. So when the phone rang at his family's home on St. Paul's East Side at 3 a.m. Friday, Chor braced himself for bad news about Nelson.
Then, as his daughter explained to him that Kham, not Nelson, had been among 13 people killed in an Army psychiatrist's rampage at Fort Hood in Texas, the father grew confused and angry.
How could his unarmed son have died on U.S. soil two months before being deployed to Afghanistan? And how will he find the words to explain this to his other son, the one on the battlefield?
"I could understand if he died in Afghanistan or Iraq, where they are under attack and going head-to-head with the enemy," Chor, 52, said in Hmong, as his son-in-law translated. "I don't know how I can explain it to his younger brother."
As Kham's 10 siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins crowded around the family's red couches and tables of fruit Friday, the "CBS Evening News" came on their television, with Katie Couric reporting the horrific news from Fort Hood.
All day, Chor, who fought with CIA-backed soldiers in Laos during the Vietnam War, had kept his emotions frozen. But when he recalled coming to America when Kham was a toddler, he could no longer hold back his tears.
"He would always tag along and be at my father's side -- he loved his grandfather so much," Chor said, weeping as he recalled his own late father, Xia Soua Xiong, the first of the family's three generations of soldiers.