Letter to Terrie, 14 December 1970 — the $3.30-per-minute phone call and the Christmas-present joke

What the letter is

14 December 1970. Charlie writes Terrie at the University of Maryland from a rear-area Vietnam base — presumably Da Nang, given the late-tour timing and the consistent place references in the surrounding letters. The letter follows up on a seven-minute phone call he had made two days earlier (Sunday evening Maryland time), and is the kind of steady, dry, mostly-administrative letter that the rear-area part of the tour produced.

The phone call

“As you know I called you today. It was probably Sunday evening to you. Actually I’m very safe here. This place hasn’t been hit for over a year at least. I’ve been into the city only once and even it is quite safe. The highways aren’t really very safe primarily because everyone drives like a maniac.”

Long-distance phone calls from Vietnam to the United States in 1970 ran through the Military Affiliate Radio System (MARS), a U.S. military shortwave network that connected service members in country to civilian U.S. telephone lines through volunteer ham-radio operators on the U.S. end. Calls required appointments, ran a few minutes at a time, and were charged to the recipient’s phone bill at the standard long-distance rate plus a service surcharge — the $3.30-per-minute Charlie names here was typical for the period.

“I figure the call I made will increase your phone bill $2–300 or so as it was a 7 minute call at $3.30/min. Take it out of the money I gave you and call that your Xmas present.”

The math comes to about $23. Charlie is treating it as her Christmas present — he had already sent her money, he tells her to take the call cost out of it, and they are square. The framing is the standard small-domestic accounting of the corpus — every dollar tracked, every transaction folded into the broader stream.

The Vietnamese-girl tease

“You seem to be concerned that I won’t marry you or something. Well I guess only time will tell. I was going to bring home a little Vietnamese girl but I don’t know how that would work out. People might talk and all.”

The tease lands inside a serious thread Terrie has been raising about whether Charlie still intended to marry her. Charlie answers in the dry teasing register that runs through every letter — turning the seriousness back at her with the Vietnamese-girl joke that he half-knows she won’t find funny. The follow-on sentence (open in the scan, partial here) suggests he then circles back to commit more directly.

The pattern is familiar from the corpus: when the emotional stakes rise, Charlie reaches for the dry humor of his autobiography and his Vietnam letters together — the same voice that wrote “I really hope I get sick more often” in the September malaria letter is the voice writing this Vietnamese-girl tease in December. The teasing is the way he carries the seriousness rather than a deflection from it.

What the letter records

The rear-area December rhythm: safe enough to walk to the local city, dangerous mostly because of the traffic, with phone access expensive but functional, mail running normally, Christmas money already in transit, and the tour clocking down on schedule for the ETS-from-Vietnam plan Charlie would formally lay out five weeks later in the 19 January 1971 letter. The letter is the small steady marker between the September malaria recovery at Cam Ranh Bay and the late-January extension strategy.