Will and Peggy at Charlie and Terrie's wedding, early 1970s

Will and Peggy Eesley as the groom’s parents at Charlie and Terrie’s wedding, somewhere in the early 1970s. Peggy in a pale-blue knee-length dress with a pink-and-yellow floral corsage; Will in a brown suit with a wide red-and-orange tie and a white carnation boutonnière. Both mid-laugh, at exactly the same moment.

This is the wedding that the Letters from Vietnam had been the long approach to — the courtship that ran across Charlie’s 1969–1971 tour, with most of the letters going home to Terrie at Marietta College, ending in the day this photograph is from. The other figures in the frame are partial: a dark-suited man over Peggy’s left shoulder, a young woman with bare arms at the far left edge, a small girl in a patterned dress half-cropped at the right. The church steps and the column behind the family read as a Marietta-area church.

What the photograph carries that nothing else in the archive does: both of Charlie’s parents, mid-laugh, on his wedding day. Will would live another decade-plus past this picture — long enough to see Chuck arrive in December 1979 — and die on 2 June 1986. Peggy would live another twenty-one years beyond that, dying on 21 May 2007 at Harmar Place in Marietta, age 92. This is them at the height of their second act as a couple in the family’s photographic record.