Letters Then and Now

By Patricia McTiernan

A few weeks after a stay-at-home advisory was issued in Massachusetts, I turned 60. As someone with a chronic illness, I felt I had jumped head first into the high-risk pool. With a long-planned vacation cancelled, I reconciled to staying home a lot and tackling projects I had long put off.

There are, for instance, the letters. My father wrote them to friends at home while serving in the Infantry during World War II. I’ve wanted to transcribe them, to share with family. They have faded with time, but his handwriting is clear. With no deadline, I work in the quiet of my suburban home’s third floor at my makeshift desk: a heavy, laminated board set upon two metal file cabinets.

My father used to say, “I was no hero,” whenever he spoke about the war. He did not rush to enlist after Pearl Harbor, as many younger men did. He was drafted, spending the first two years training stateside before shipping overseas. His company arrived at Omaha Beach two weeks after the famous D-day landing, to fight in the Normandy countryside and on into Austria and Germany.

I often think of World War II as the last great challenge that truly affected everyone in one way or another. Certainly some sacrificed more than others, and inequities abounded. But unlike other wars and national crises that followed, in WWII, no one was completely shielded from the effects—whether food and gas rationing or being sent overseas to battle.

In the letters from Europe, my father is 34 years old and single. He is writing to close friends, a married couple who live in the same small town where my father grew up. He is chatty about their shared acquaintances, happy for another young couple expecting their first child.

But when he writes about the Army, which is often, he is frustrated. The best years of his life are being consumed by war. The point system used to determine when enlisted men can be discharged is unfair. He is having no luck in getting an emergency furlough to visit his sick, aging father back home.

When he recovers from injuries sustained in the Battle of the Bulge, he is sent, not to H Company, the comrades he has been with since the start, but to a tank battalion. “I know as much about a tank as you know about running a submarine,” he writes.

This summer marks 35 years since my father died. I’ve spent far more time on the planet without him than with him, yet he hovers as an influencing presence in my life. I knew him as congenial and calm, the peacemaker in our family. He was the brother that his siblings called upon when they needed help, the father who read three newspapers every day and wanted more than anything for his daughters to love the game of golf.

Yet the voice in the letters, for the most part, is not a voice I recognize. He is 11 years away from becoming a father, and 15 years from becoming my father. He is stuck. His life is not his own. He has no control—over the war, over his place in it, over his father’s health.

This summer also marks 75 years since the end of World War II.

Here in the pandemic, I feel a kinship with the lack of control that my father and others must have felt back then. While my comfortable life is nothing like war, I am stuck in a situation not of my own making. I embrace the privilege of staying home to be safe, yet I also feel the constraints of not being able to do much else.

But in the heat of summer afternoons, I move to the first floor. Sitting at the dining room table I work in the present, writing my own letters. Like my father, I am no hero.

Unlike my father’s letters, mine are addressed to complete strangers. I channel my horror at my country’s decline over the past three years into something I have to still believe in: voting.

Through get-out-the vote organizations, I am writing to people in Texas and Michigan. I’m sending postcards to Pennsylvanians.

I write the same message again and again. I’ll never meet the people I am writing to; we’ll never get to celebrate a victory together. And as deaths from the virus mount, I have to wonder: Are they still healthy; are they still alive?

Many will no doubt toss my correspondence in the recycling bin. But it’s possible that my efforts, however small, may be meaningful to some.

In one of his letters to his friends my father wrote, “I am well and have gotten thru a lot and hope to be lucky enough to continue thru the battles that lie ahead.”

That’s the voice I knew. And the hopeful message that resonates today.

For now, I am safe and well. The country has gotten through a lot. But in this time when so much is uncertain, I hope that those who receive my letters will understand how important they are to winning the battle that lies ahead.

Patricia McTiernan recently retired as a communications director in the nonprofit healthcare sector. She is an editor and writer in the Greater Boston area. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, The Sun magazine, and The Examined Life Journal. Follow her on Twitter: @AceMct.

Photo by Kari Sullivan on Unsplash.