Between the Letters: Life, Love, And War

I miss you.
Why haven’t you written.
Thank God, you’re safe.
These are the beginning lines of some of the hundreds of letters between a freshly-commissioned U.S. Navy ensign and his fiancee, a new nurse graduate, from the start of their relationship until eighteen months later when he returns from Vietnam. Between these letters are first person accounts of the fledgling naval officer’s life in charge of a five-man crew aboard a fifty-foot Swift Boat, patrolling the coastal waters and rivers in I Corps, the northernmost military operational area of South Vietnam. The letters and stories show the challenges of life-and death-in a combat zone and provide a glimpse into the stress-filled lives of these two young people, separated by the war and thousands of miles across an ocean and a continent.