They went to war in 64

The boys went to war in 64. Some of them didn’t come back. This is the story of one of them. I’ll call him Tom.

I was in high school then, and Friday nights usually meant going to the air force base dance. There, the local giggly girls, many who had been friends for ages, met the boys from all around the country who had met their new best friends only days ago.

Or at least that’s what they said, or thought. In reality, most of these boys-on-the cusp-of-manhood, were escaping dreary small town futures, and were infectiously full of hope. At least at the beginning. At least before they flew over the pond . . .

Well. This story is about one of them, a darling youngster who never ceased to make me smile. Even now, more than 40 years later, I look at old letters and smile.

There were a lot of GIs to choose from, and there were plenty of us Non-Mormon girls in the Land of Zion. My family moved to Utah (where dad hired on as a civilian on the base, making decent regular wages) when I was four, because my dad just wasn’t cut out to be a farmer in Wisconsin. Wages were decent and regular, but dad wasn’t much cut out to work for someone else, always being his own man, but that’s another story.

Tom was from a big Wisconsin college town, so the first time I took him home to meet my folks, my dad was mightily impressed ‘cause that boy could talk both farming (from his grandparents’ experience) and big city talk, like traffic and taxis and bars and restaurants and big football games.

Although Tom’s dad was a college professor, that wasn’t what he wanted when he got home from the war. He would decide later . . .

And I’ll tell the rest of the story, or some of it, later.