Fifty years ago, the soldier I was writing to vanished. Today, I heard his name at the VFW. For fifty-three years, I thought the first boy I ever truly cared about had died in a jungle halfway across the world.
It’s a strange thing to carry a ghost with you for your entire adult life.
You don’t think about them every day, but they live in the quiet corners of your mind, suspended forever in the exact moment they vanished. When I was sixteen years old, my high school history teacher decided our class needed to understand the reality of the world beyond our small town.
She organized a project where we would write letters to soldiers serving overseas. It was supposed to be a simple act of civic duty—a few lines of encouragement sent off to young men who were far from home. We drew names out of a metal coffee tin.
The slip of paper I pulled had a single name written in neat cursive: Eddie, from Kentucky. I remember sitting at my desk that evening, chewing on the end of my pen, completely unsure of what to say. What does a teenage girl living a sheltered life in a town called Sycamore write to a young man fighting in a brutal, terrifying war?
I started with the basics. I introduced myself, described my family, and apologized in advance for being boring. A month later, a letter arrived with military postage. Eddie wrote back. He had terrible handwriting, slanting heavily to the right, but his words were thoughtful and incredibly kind.
Over the next two years, we became a constant in each other’s lives. Eddie would write about the stifling, oppressive heat. He wrote about the monsoon rains that never seemed to stop and the unrelenting fear that hung over his platoon.
Mostly, though, he wrote about a bone-deep homesickness that bled through every line.
He missed the rolling green hills of Kentucky. He missed his mother’s cooking. He missed the feeling of feeling safe. In return, I wrote about absolutely nothing of consequence. I felt guilty at first, sharing my trivial life with someone in a combat zone. I wrote about the drama of school dances, the neighborhood gossip, the stray dog I had adopted, and the way the leaves were turning colors in the crisp autumn air.
I apologized once for burdening him with such silly things. His next letter was adamant. He told me my letters were his lifeline. The mundane details of my life in Sycamore were exactly what he needed—a tether keeping him grounded to the real world, a reminder that normal life still existed somewhere.
We grew incredibly close. I knew his hopes, his fears, and his plans for when he finally got a ticket home. I had a single, grainy photograph he had sent of himself leaning against a jeep, smiling a tired but genuine smile. I kept it tucked in my vanity mirror.
