DEAR JOHN

Almost as feared as the enemy bullet was the “Dear John” letter.  I took this photo of a buddy the night he got one.  I don’t know what his real name was—we always called him Rosie. It was probably his girlfriend’s name—but it doesn’t matter—it could have been almost any of us at one time or another.  Hardly a week went by without somebody getting one.  Mail call was often referred to as the “Dear John” roundup.  They were almost always the same story.  A guy would get a letter from his girl informing him that she didn’t want to hurt him but she’d met someone else and, from now on, she just wanted to be friends.  Since they hadn’t seen each other in seven or eight months, how could he expect her to be faithful for an entire year?  After coming to terms with the one I got, I began to counsel others who got them by telling them to look at it as a blessing in disguise.  Any woman who didn’t have enough strength of character to stand by her man in his time of need wasn’t worth going back to anyway. 

The most unusual “Dear John” I ever saw came in a box to my buddy Glover.  Glover was a typical California boy: a blond hair, blue eyed surfer who was always doing pushups and sit-ups and he had a body that reflected his dedication.  He was always writing letters to influential people. In response to a letter he wrote to his State Senator, he received a California State flag that Glover displayed proudly above his rack.  He wrote a letter to the editor of Playboy highly critical of the war and even signed his name.  Lots of bets were placed on how much trouble he would get into but nothing ever came of it.  One day, he received a package from his wife.  He was so excited; he thought it was cookies or something.  When he opened it up, he found a roll of toilet paper with the longest “Dear John” written on it anybody had seen.  Why she had to be so vicious I can’t say.  I guess she thought it would break his heart, that it would make him cry. Well, it did.

I always wondered if the people back home who wrote letters such as these had any idea of how psychologically devastating they were. We had so few personal possessions of a sentimental nature.  In most cases, it was no more than a cherished photo and a pack of letters.  Letters from a loved one were never thrown out, but read and re-read--sometimes to our closest buddy, but mostly to ourselves in moments of solitude.  I don’t ever remember seeing a guy take out a Bible to read, but I do remember a lot of guys re-reading their love letters as if it were the Bible.  I guess we all felt as if God had forsaken us but, please, Lord, don’t let our woman forsake us too.     

I remember one sergeant—a hardened one at that—who attempted suicide right in front of us after getting a “Dear John” from his wife.  We heard him cussing as he read the letter but that wasn’t unusual—everybody was always cussing about something.  Only after he placed his M-16 on the deck while sitting on the edge of his bunk with the flash suppresser directly under his chin did we realize something was seriously wrong.   The rest of us ran over and pulled his rifle away at the last moment.  They sent him off to sickbay and from there to “somewhere else.”  I just assumed that would be the last we saw of him but damn if they didn’t send him right back to our unit a week later.  He was terribly embarrassed as well as moody and unpredictable from that point on.  It was tough for the rest of us, too. We didn’t know what to say around him.  How stable was he?  To what degree could he be counted on?

Mail delivery was excellent, usually taking three to five days for a letter to reach us if we were in the rear and a few days more if we were in the bush.  We could send as many letters as we wanted back home without postage if we wrote ”free” in place of a stamp and most of us wrote letters every chance we got.  I am sure the reason for the excellent mail service was to improve morale, which--for the most part--it did.  But it was like a double-edged sword, cutting both ways. It was our only contact with the outside world.  Morale was obviously improved when someone got a good letter; when we got a bad one, however, nothing could destroy us more quickly or completely.

It wasn’t only “Dear John” letters that caused us so much pain and a feeling of abandonment. Friends would write about how disillusioned they were with the war and ask how could we participate is such an immoral activity.  Why didn’t we just announce to our C.O. that we weren’t going to fight any more?  Right. The letters would get shorter, less personal and more infrequent until after about four to six months, our letters were no longer answered. Other times it would be letters from  a friend or relative that were just so out of touch with our reality that they were almost infuriating.  My own mother would either write mindlessly about some cocktail party for the local Assistance League or about how beautiful it must be over there.  Why didn’t I send her some pictures?  I sent her back a photo of a dead girl with South Vietnamese soldiers standing around laughing.  She never asked for any more pictures.  My dad wrote about how glad he was that I hadn’t become a draft-dodger and caused embarrassment for his political career, or about what heroes he and others of his generation thought we were.  Maybe his friends thought we were heroes but my friends back home didn’t and the things we were doing didn’t seem very heroic to me or most of the other guys I served with.

A girl I liked a lot from my creative writing class in college used to write to me two or three times a week.  I felt myself becoming increasingly close to her with each letter and confiding to her more and more of my deepest thoughts and emotions.  When a good buddy of mine was killed by the V.C. and I had to help carry his body back, I was so upset that evening that I had to write to someone or go insane.  By now, she was about the only one of my old friends left that I felt comfortable writing to about my feelings so I wrote to her about how shaken I was to find him dead; I wrote to her about the cold chills I got when I came to his body and, staring me in the face, was my own Medevac number written across the butt of a pair of trousers I had lent him;  I told her how I couldn’t help but feel that this could have been me, or should have been me or maybe it was me and all that I was now experiencing was a post mortum dream;  I wrote of the sickening feeling I had running through the fields carrying his corpse on a stretcher trying not to notice that his head was blown open and his brains were spilling out;  I wrote of the awful smell of death from this lifeless cadaver that only the night before had been the buddy I was joking and clowning around with.  I told her how full of hatred I had become toward the V.C; how I felt like volunteering for every patrol so I could personally blow away as many of the little bastards as I could.

 I guess I confided in her a little too deeply because I never heard from her again.

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