May 29, 2016
Dear Sir,
I just found out about you in April when I was at my brother’s apartment in Providence to celebrate our parent’s 50th anniversary. As my parents, my brother, and I watched my niece Evie run up and down the living room showing us toys before dinner, my brother asked my parents to tell us about their wedding day. I was kind of expecting them to talk about who attended and what the weather was like, but the story we heard was so much more meaningful than that. You’ve been on my mind ever since.
Our mother told my brother and I that she and our father had been planning to get married on Valentine’s Day, 1966, but when he received his draft notice in December of 1965 telling him he had to report to boot camp in January, they moved the date to the 30th of April. He’d be home on leave then before heading off to wherever he was going to be stationed. Everyone assumed overseas, but no one was sure where.
She told us that her parents weren’t too keen on their daughter getting married so young (she was 19) in the first place, and that the draft notice really reinforced their opinion that my mother and father should wait until my father returned home from his full tour of duty. My mother wouldn’t have it. She insisted on getting married before my father was deployed, mostly because of what happened to you. A year or two earlier, you married someone from her neighborhood right before you left to go overseas.
My mom and dad got married on April 30, 1966 in a little church in Warwick and my father left for Germany to drive tanks not long after. He was a sole surviving son and thus didn’t get sent to combat. As I think about you, I assume that you must have had a brother. You had been sent to Vietnam a year before my parents were married. You were a sailor in the navy. You never came home.
Your sacrifice over fifty years ago defined a beginning in my family. Please know that your spirit lives on. I wanted you to know that my mother has never forgotten you and your bride. Now that I now know your story, neither will I.
Joy Slusarek is the owner of JOY all things underthings in Manchester Center, Vermont. She was raised by an army veteran and his bride in Coventry, Rhode Island.
