Charlie returning from Vietnam, c. 1971

Charlie Eesley home from his Vietnam tour, photographed at the Eesley family’s house in Marietta sometime after his 14 June 1971 ETS from the U.S. Army. The handwritten caption at the bottom of the print, written years later by Charlie’s wife Terrie in red felt-tip, reads:

RETURNING FROM VIETNAM — CHARLIE CIRCA 1972 EESLEY

The year has been written over — the 2 on top of what appears to be an earlier 1. Charlie’s tour ended in June 1971. The photograph could date from that summer or fall (Terrie’s first reading); or from a later moment in late 1971 or early 1972 if her overwriting was correcting upward. Either way the frame sits in the first six-to-eighteen months after his return.

What the photograph shows

Charlie stands in front of a tall wood bookshelf packed with leather-bound volumes — the run reads as legal references or the family’s reference set (the kind of bookshelf the Sixth Street house carried in its public rooms). He is wearing the U.S. Army officer’s full-length wool overcoat (the standard Army Green overcoat of the late-Vietnam-era uniform regulation, double-breasted with epaulettes), with a dark tie visible beneath. He has his glasses on, his hair is short, and he is smiling broadly, turned slightly to look off to his right at someone outside the frame — possibly the photographer or the person whose hand is visible at the very left edge of the frame holding a drink, raising it toward him in welcome.

On the shelf to his right, a small picture frame is visible, containing what reads as a family portrait. Charlie holds something in his left hand — possibly a souvenir from the tour, possibly a letter opener from the shelf.

The whole composition is a homecoming: the officer’s coat, the bookshelves of his parents’ house, the drink being raised to him from off-camera, the easy smile. After 602 days in Vietnam, the malaria episode of September 1970, the Da Nang clerk’s job after Camp Eagle, the Hawaii R&R in April 1971, and the long ride home — this is the frame on the other side of all of it.

See also

• Letters from Vietnam — the corpus of correspondence that this photograph closes.
• Charlie’s page — the figure here whose army year had just ended.

Source: Eesley family archive; caption in Peggy McMaster Eesley’s hand; transmitted by Chuck Eesley, June 2026.