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letter
Letter to Terrie, 29 August 1970 — 109 days in, and 'we will work things out as they happen'
Charlie's two-page letter to Terrie dated 29 August 1970, reassembled from its scans (dad308 page 1, dad309 page 2). His unit is moving to a new, unknown location tomorrow. Answering her question about action around Firebase O'Reilly and Firebase Katherine, he reports no recent activity he's heard of, with South Vietnamese troops holding O'Reilly and doing a good job despite some losses; he's currently in the mountains near the coast and shouldn't be heading toward Katherine, though plans change. August is almost over, 'thank God,' and he's now 109 days in-country. He's more exasperated than devastated that her last letter suggests she won't graduate next June — 'you sure know how to mess up things!!' — and works out a contingency: if she needs to finish in summer school instead, the wedding timing doesn't have to change, just the honeymoon, which would move to August after he's found a job. He decides it might even work out for the best, giving them a chance to live together and adjust to each other first. He closes on a peaceful day before an expected hard resupply day tomorrow.
What the letter is
29 August 1970, two pages that pivot from firebase geography to wedding logistics without much of a seam. Charlie answers Terrie’s question about the fighting near Firebase O’Reilly and Firebase Katherine with the same flat situational report he gives throughout the corpus, marks 109 days in-country with visible relief that August is over, and then works through the practical consequences of Terrie possibly not graduating on schedule — irritated, but already solving for it before the page is done.
Transcription
August 29
Dear Terrie,
We move to a new location tomorrow and I don’t really know where yet. You asked about the action around O’Reilly and Katherine. I haven’t heard of any recent activity, but I know that the S. Vietnamese are near O’Reilly and that although they lost a few men, they are doing a good job. I hope they keep it up and replace all the GI’s in the mountains. I’m sort of in the mountains now, near the coast though. We shouldn’t be going near Katherine, but you never know.
August is just about over, thank God. I now have 109 days in country now.
From your last letter it seems as if you aren’t going to graduate next June. You sure know how to mess up things!!
[page 2:] I guess if you don’t graduate you could at least finish up the following summer in summer school. I assume you would have less than 10 hrs to go. If that is the situation it wouldn’t matter when we got married. It could still be late June or early July. It is just that I would get a job and we wouldn’t go on a honeymoon till August or so. It doesn’t really matter. We will work things out as they happen. It might even be better the way it seems to be happening — it would give us a chance to live together for a while and get used to each other. Oh well.
It seems like a rather peaceful day today. Tomorrow is resupply day and will be a hassle, I know. I can’t think of much else to say except I have the envelope numbers in case I write more today.
Love Charles
What the letter records
O’Reilly and Katherine, from the other side of the letter. Terrie is the one asking about the fighting here, not Charlie volunteering it — a reminder that the news reaching Maryland about specific firebases was detailed enough for her to ask pointed questions, and that Charlie’s answers were the family’s most reliable ground-level source. The same two firebases anchor the 3 October letter’s account of the drawdown.
“You sure know how to mess up things!!” Charlie’s irritation is real but short-lived — by the next paragraph he has already built a full contingency plan around the possibility. It’s characteristic of how he handles setbacks throughout the correspondence: register the frustration, then solve the logistics.
A wedding plan built for slippage. Date roughly fixed (late June or early July), honeymoon detachable and deferred to August, and a silver lining reasoned into place — living together before the wedding, “to get used to each other.” The same idea surfaces two months later, framed as simply practical, in the 20 October letter: “Do you want to get an apartment with me til we are married? It seems to be the thing to do.”
109 days, “thank God.” The relief of finishing a month is a recurring beat — the same note struck later at 165 days and the one-year mark — each milestone treated as a small, real accomplishment against the total.
Scans
