For fifty years, I carried the quiet, unresolved heartbreak of a teenage girl who lost her first real connection to a war taking place halfway across the world. It wasn’t a tragedy that I spoke about often.

It was simply a dull ache, a question mark left permanently hanging at the end of my adolescence.

It started when I was sixteen years old. It was the late 1960s, a time when the world felt both incredibly large and terrifyingly fragile. My high school civics teacher assigned our class a project: we were each to write a letter to a soldier stationed overseas.

We were told to be cheerful, to provide a slice of normal American life to young men who were thousands of miles away from everything they knew. My neatly penned envelope was randomly assigned to an Army infantryman named Eddie, a boy from a small town in Kentucky.

I didn’t expect much to come of it. Maybe a polite postcard in return, or nothing at all. But a month later, a letter arrived with military postage and handwriting that was hurried but precise. Eddie wrote back. That first letter sparked a correspondence that lasted for two entire years.

We became tethers for one another. Eddie would write about the suffocating heat of the jungle, the endless monsoon rains that soaked right through to their bones, and a crushing, quiet homesickness that he confessed he could never admit to the other guys in his unit.

He told me about the smell of diesel fuel and damp earth, and how much he missed the simple sound of a lawnmower on a Saturday morning. In return, I wrote about what felt like absolutely nothing. I wrote about mundane hometown gossip, the songs playing on the local radio station, the dress I was making for the spring dance, and the way the sycamore trees looked when the leaves began to turn.

I always felt a little guilty for rambling about such trivial things while he was fighting a war, but he insisted I never stop. He told me that my letters were his only lifeline to sanity, a reminder that a normal, gentle world still existed somewhere out there.

Then came the spring of 1971. I sent a letter in March, expecting a reply by April. April bled into May. May turned into June. The letters just stopped coming. In today’s world, you can find anyone. You can search a name, send a text, or track a digital footprint.

Back then, silence was an impenetrable wall. You didn’t have a way to track someone down or ask questions of the military bureaucracy. The evening news broadcasts were a nightly parade of grim statistics, casualty counts, and black-and-white footage of helicopters in the dust. When the silence from Eddie stretched from weeks into months, there was only one logical conclusion to draw.

You just prayed, swallowed your tears, and forced yourself to accept the worst.