Letter to Dorothy Hauser, 1 January 1971 — 'Say hi to the Mothers for Peace for me'

What the letter is

1 January 1971. Charlie writes from Da Nang at 3 AM Vietnam time, on guard duty, addressed to “Dorothy.” The Dorothy in question is Dorothy Hauser — Peggy McMaster Eesley’s friend in Marietta and a member of the Mothers for Peace group Peggy belonged to in the early 1970s.

The letter is short. It would not be especially noteworthy were it not for two things: it confirms the Dorothy Hauser identification the site had been uncertain about (a confusion that arose around the April 1971 parental conflict letter when the name “Dorothy” was initially misread as Terrie’s mother Dorothy Wildermuth), and it carries Charlie’s most direct piece of political commentary on Richard Nixon anywhere in the corpus.

Transcription

Jan 1

Dear Dorothy,

Happy New Year! It is 3 AM over here and I’m on guard in Danang. I hope the generals don’t feel too secure because if there is anything that happens [I’ll bet] the enemy through just to give everyone here a taste of combat.

Well one good thing here is the price of booze. Taxes must be terrible back in the States.

I guess Tricky Dick hasn’t ruined the whole country yet. I guess he is having problems and needs a few more years to do an efficient job.

Say hi to the Mothers for Peace for me.

Charles

What the letter records

The Dorothy Hauser confirmation. The site previously carried a tentative identification of “Dorothy” (in the April 1971 parental conflict letter and elsewhere) as either Dorothy Wildermuth (Terrie’s mother) or Dorothy Hauser (Peggy’s friend). Chuck flagged the Hauser hypothesis as more likely. The closing line “Say hi to the Mothers for Peace for me” — addressed to the same Dorothy, in a private letter Charlie was sending from Vietnam — settles it: this Dorothy was Peggy’s Mothers for Peace friend. Dorothy was, by January 1971, sufficiently woven into the Eesley household that Charlie wrote her a personal New Year’s letter from Da Nang. The two had a real correspondence.

The Mothers for Peace circle in Marietta. Mothers for Peace was a national women’s anti-war network active during the Vietnam era. Peggy McMaster Eesley’s participation in the Marietta-area chapter is one of the few pieces of direct political engagement the archive documents on Charlie’s mother’s side. The local group included Dorothy Hauser, whose own family was apparently following Charlie’s tour through Peggy — close enough for Charlie to send a personal letter back, and to assume Dorothy would carry his greetings to the rest of the women.

The Nixon line. “I guess Tricky Dick hasn’t ruined the whole country yet. I guess he is having problems and needs a few more years to do an efficient job.” This is the only direct piece of Nixon commentary in Charlie’s surviving Vietnam letters. The register is the period-standard anti-Nixon nickname (“Tricky Dick”), with Charlie’s quiet dry irony layered over it — “needs a few more years to do an efficient job” — the joke being that a few more years of Nixon would in fact finish the job of ruining the country, and the implicit suggestion that he had already gotten well underway. It is the closest the corpus comes to Charlie writing politically in his own voice. The line lands at the end of a year that had included Kent State (May 1970), the Cambodia incursion (April-May 1970), and the start of the slow public reading that Nixon’s Vietnam policy was not in fact winding the war down on the timetable he had promised in 1968.

That Charlie sent this line to a Mothers for Peace member — rather than to Terrie or to Peggy — is itself the careful piece of audience-targeting. Dorothy was the right reader for it. Peggy might have agreed, but the letter would have been a different letter to her. To Dorothy, the line was being said to someone Charlie knew would receive it in the spirit it was sent.

The 3 AM guard duty register. “It is 3 AM over here and I’m on guard in Danang. I hope the generals don’t feel too secure because if there is anything that happens [I’ll bet] the enemy through just to give everyone here a taste of combat.” The morbidly-affectionate New Year’s joke — from a soldier at a quiet rear-area post on the first hours of 1971, watching for an enemy action that almost certainly would not come, gently mocking the rear-area commanders who would, if anything did happen, treat it as their first taste of actual war — is the same dry register the later 4 February Laos fore-warning letter carries about the Army’s strategic posture.

The booze line. “One good thing here is the price of booze. Taxes must be terrible back in the States.” Alcohol at PX prices in country was substantially cheaper than at U.S. retail, before federal and state alcohol taxes. The small note is one of the practical comparisons soldiers made in their letters home about what country-life cost them versus what stateside life would.

What this letter does for the archive

It closes the loop on the Dorothy Hauser identification that had been ambiguous since the April 1971 parental conflict letter and the Mothers for Peace research-thread retraction on Dorothy Wildermuth’s page. Dorothy Hauser was real, was close to Peggy, was part of Mothers for Peace, and was a person Charlie himself wrote to from Vietnam. The framing across the archive should reflect that, including:

• The Dorothy Hauser person page (if not yet created, should be);
• The Mothers for Peace reference on Peggy’s page should be kept and tied to Dorothy directly;
• The April 1971 parental conflict letter framing that had hedged the Dorothy reference can be tightened.

It also surfaces, for the first time in the corpus, Charlie’s own political voice on the war’s politics — not just the practical military reading of the Laos thread, but a direct read on the man running the country at the time. That voice is dry, quiet, and pointed. It sounds exactly like the same Charlie the 1970 marijuana / Donut Dollies letter sounds like, applied to the Nixon presidency rather than to GI culture.

Source: grandmaE1.pdf page 140 (gitignored locally; transcribed content surfaced here). The letter is one sheet, addressed to Dorothy, written 1 January 1971 at 3 AM Vietnam time from Da Nang.