I like the basic story here:

Quite a lot, author, but all the technical issues kept tripping me up. Some are simple like word repetition—"Emily rolled over" two paragraphs after the first divider and "She rolled over" in the next paragraph, or "up" appearing four times in the same paragraph a little further on: "Emily drew up her coat", "cleaning up the saliva", "would have to get up" and "Emily instinctively reached up." Being aware of the words you're using always makes the prose flow better. I'll mention the typos, too—"Wmily" and "He'll" when you mean Hell in that opening scene, for instance.

Then there are the several times you have one character's action tags inside another character's dialogue. For example:

“Of course, honey. I’m assuming you want me to talk about the war?” She nodded. “Well, once upon a time in the year nineteen sixty nine—"

Here, it's Caleb talking but Emily doing the nodding. Mixing tags and dialogue like this confuses readers like me, and when readers like me get confused, we tend to stop reading and move on to something else. Or the following paragraph:

“Not in here.” He shooed Emily off. She stuck her head back in the garage after she left, asking, “Dad, where does Silvercatch live?”

We start with Caleb's line, then get Caleb's action, then get Emily's action, then get Emily's line. That definitely needs to be divided up so only one character's speaking and acting per paragraph.

Even trickier are the POV shifts. I'll be riding along inside Emily's head, seeing the world through her eyes, and then at random times I'll suddenly find myself hopping out. The line, "With that, she was gone." for instance. If we're following along in Emily's POV, how can she be gone? She's how we're experiencing the story. To tell us that she's gone shatters the POV. Or here:

Emily ran out. Caleb barely had time to get situated before she barged back in, pencil in one hand, loose leaf paper in the other. “Alright. Go!”

He gave her a look and purposefully made himself extra comfortable. Checking his tools, setting them down, accidentally turning them on, then turning them off, and swiping powder off of his seat, he finally decided that it was alright to talk. She groaned, exasperated, and he was pleased.

We've jumped from Emily's POV over to Caleb's, and we wobble back and forth between the two of them for the rest of the scene. The same thing happens in the next scene between Emily and Silvercatch: we start out in his head looking at Emily, then jump over to her head looking at him two paragraphs later.

My suggestion is always: pick a POV and stick with it. Doing an omniscient POV, one that lets you look into the heads of all the characters, is really pretty hard and usually means creating a narrative character, a character who's telling the story but isn't actually in it. Check out the way Dickens does it in A Christmas Carol or Dumas in The Three Musketeers if you want to see examples. Here, though, I'd recommend sticking with Emily's POV during the 3rd person parts of the story and adding more of the 1st person narration from Caleb's POV that you start the story with. Bring his 1st person stuff in between the scenes where Emily's going around and getting info so we can see the process Caleb went through in order to adopt her.

Which is the biggest question I have about the story. Would this be possible in real life? Would an unmarried soldier who's been in therapy be allowed to adopt an orphaned child like this back in the mid 1970s?

I should stop before this gets to be longer than the story itself. But with some research and cleaning up, this could be quite nice.

Mike

Going to echo BB on some of the POV shifts. I've softened my tone on POV switching (I used to be against it in almost all circumstances), but even so you have switches within paragraphs, which make it seem as if Caleb has suddenly become the POV character.

A few things stood out to me that seemed odd, and I wasn't sure if there was some deeper meaning behind them. Most notable was the constant mention of plastic with the guns -- not many guns have plastic parts, and the 1911 certainly doesn't, except possibly the grip panel. But even then it would be a stretch to use the term plastic to describe any gun except (disparagingly) a Glock.

It had me waiting for some kind of twist or reveal toward the end, but it never came. Minor point, but there you go.

I really like the concept here, with the backstory slowly being revealed through different viewpoints. It makes the reveal feel satisfying, and it gives the bulk to the story that might otherwise be too straightforward/simple.

But I think that I ended up kind of having some fridge issues with this. First and foremost, it struck me as odd that a Vietnamese-American girl would never have conceived of the idea of being adopted, considering that her dad's last name is Kimberly. Secondly, it felt kind of convenient that all three interviewees were basically within arm's reach of each other. I think I would have liked it if we could have breaks between the interviews, instead of having Emily rush from one to the next within the span of what feels like just a couple of hours at most.

As for the reveal itself, I'll have to be honest and admit that it kind of felt a little standard to me. The two parts of it (in war people both sides can unexpectedly do awful things + the adoption reveal) don't really seem to be interacting with each other very much, but when you take each one on their own, they feel very expect-able from the premise of the story. I think what's going on here might be that the story struggles to find a way to make these reveals uniquely personal to Emily. You might need to work on making her perspective more integral to the reveal. Maybe have it so that she can't reconcile the idea of her father being a killer contrasting with memories of him being gentle. or have the adoption reveal be at odds with a lie that she's been told that she was adopted from Thailand or something. What I'm saying is, Emily needs to have more tangible stakes in this twist, IMO.

One last very minor quibble is that guns don't clack or make noise when they're just being moved or generally handled. The whole idea about guns having all these mechanical sounds when they're touched comes entirely from Hollywood audio tropes. A real gun will generally not make any significant sound, unless you're charging/racking it (a very deliberate action that can take a surprising amount of force) or firing it.

So overall, while I like the general construction and the idea behind this one, there are some execution-level hiccups in my reading experience. I really think that smoothing out the stakes of the reveal along with maybe addressing a couple of fridge-logic questions would really help make this piece pay off on its full potential.

Thanks for writing!