Tribunal is a novel about judgments. How, in the clear light of the present, do we make sense of the past? What do we remember, and what do we choose to forget? Two people, survivors of the tragic events of the wars in Indo-China—a solider and a State Department employee—cross paths by accident on another momentous occasion, Inauguration Day, 1981. They spend a few hours exchanging versions of the history of which they were a part, and then return to their solitary lives. Decades later, in another place and in a different time, the soldier recollects and reconstructs his meeting with a woman with whom he shared memories that are quickly fading away. Tribunal is itself an act of remembrance and judgment, exploring the ways in which we survive and commemorate the traumas of the past.