Dear Soldier: A Marine Rifleman's Reply to a Christmas Letter Received from a Young Girl 54 Years Earlier. Christmas 1967 on the Dmz in Vietnam

By Charles Glenn Estes

This is a short story replying to a Christmas letter that I received from a young girl walking through a chow line on Christmas Day 1967 at Con Thien, Vietnam, 850 meters from the border with North Viet Nam.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Nov 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781489744845

Charles Glenn Estes

Charles Estes is a retired mechanical engineer. He was a marine rifleman who fought with Echo Company, 2nd Bn, 1st Marine Regt in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. He came home and struggled with undiagnosed PTSD. He eventually graduated from college, married, and raised a loving family

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Charles Glenn Estes.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by

any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

LifeRich Publishing is a registered trademark of The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.

LifeRich Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.liferichpublishing.com

844-686-9607

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained

in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views

of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-4897-4479-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-4484-5 (e)

LifeRich Publishing rev. date:   10/27/2022

36242.png

C

athy,

Hi, I hope my letter finds you well. I want to wish you and yours a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and it is with Warmest Regards. You do not know me, but I know you. I am the Dear Soldier you sent a letter to, handwritten in schoolgirl cursive, just before Christmas 1967. I want to reach out and thank you for your letter.

Cathy, after thinking more and more about responding to you, and what started as a simple reply to your letter, turned into a story about a Marine’s life in 1967 when your letter came at Christmas.

This is a short story, dedicated to you, that I wrote late at night or during early morning, after waking up, hours before daylight. Some of it was probably written after drinking a rum and coke, or two, or three. Some of it could have been written when I was listening to loud music and suddenly discovering my daughter, staring at me, after she had walked through my front door when I didn’t return her daily phone call or text messages.

Cathy, I am the Dear Soldier, that you wrote to while I was fighting in Vietnam. I have attached a copy of the letter you wrote. I hope you remember writing it, but maybe not. You were just a young schoolgirl when you wrote your letter to a Dear Soldier. So, I will refresh your memory. You said, at the end of your letter, I am going to ask you one question, please write back. Well, I am writing back. I am just a little late. Fifty-four years late, to be exact. War, for whatever reason, just has a way of taking its toll, and sometimes, it takes a while to work things out before you can write back and express your true thoughts to a young schoolgirl, like you. It is important for me to tell you about receiving your letter and what it meant to me. I am hoping those fifty-four years, between your letter and mine, have been good to you, and everyone you love, just as mine have been good to me, and all the ones that I love.

I want to share a little about my life in 1967, I want you to realize how important and what it meant to receive your schoolgirl letter, on Christmas Day, addressed to a Dear Soldier. Your letter contained everything important. It was a letter written on the type of paper I had used in grade school and it so reminded me of my childhood and my family when I was reading it by candlelight on Christmas night.

I am not a soldier Cathy; I am a Marine Rifleman. It does not matter how you addressed your letter, we were Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airman, Coast Guard, and your letter was addressed to all of us, and your letter was well intentioned. We were all risking our lives for this country. It was a time when you were too young to realize what combat, and the struggle to stay alive was all about. You said on your folded cover page, fight hard for us please. And we did. Fifty-eight thousand guys would die in Vietnam, for this country, when you were young and had no responsibility for any of it. Forty thousand of those guys, from what I have read, were twenty-two or younger. That age range of twenty-two or younger so describes my rifle squad, when your letter came on Christmas Day. Most of my squad was just out of high school, and two of us had one year of college. Vietnam was a young man’s war. Young men who were given only limited training and equipment. Somehow, we were the ones being blamed, back home, for the war. For those people back home, in their stupidity, it was as if soldiers under 22 had gotten together and made a war so we could be killed, maimed, and lose years out of our lives. So, this is for you, your family, and your teachers who were supporting us when a lot of Americans did not. As for your first sentence, I am very sorry that I did not get you anything. Cathy, you could not be more wrong. Your letter was a tremendous gift. Your letter, handwritten by a young girl, brought a moment of reflection of my life and what I was fighting for. Your letter only reinforced my determination for being a combat Marine and fighting for someone like you…...when I was twenty-one and twenty-two!!!

I remember grade school and being in class and being assigned a class project, maybe something like writing letters to soldiers in a faraway war at Christmas time. And I know you literally had no connection to the horrors we were facing. But I could read between the lines in your letter. You were a young girl, struggling to understand, and struggling to do your absolute best. I can just surmise that your letter was a class project, from a caring teacher. A class project that came with some quiet time. Time when you were asked to write down your real thoughts about what you would say to American soldiers fighting a war you did not understand.