Letter to Terrie, 31 December 1970 — '10-month tour is definite, I should be home in March'

What the letter is

31 December 1970. New Year’s Eve. Charlie writes Terrie a short letter from somewhere in I Corps with the practical-and-tired register of a soldier who has just heard official-sounding news he’s been waiting on for months: the 10-month tour-shortening drop is definite. The Army had, by late 1970, formally shortened the standard 12-month Vietnam tour to 10 months as part of the Vietnamization-era troop drawdown; Charlie’s deployment in March 1970 had put him in the cohort that would be eligible. By his 31 December calculation he would be home sometime in March 1971, three months before the eventual ETS he would target.

The letter is one of the small key moments of the corpus. It records the version of Charlie’s post-tour future that he ultimately did not take. Three weeks later the 19 January 1971 ETS-extension strategy letter would record his decision to extend instead — trading the home-by-March possibility for the cleaner discharge-from-Vietnam path on 14 June 1971.

Transcription

Dec 31

Dear Terrie,

Well the days keep rolling by. I’ve heard the 10-month tour is definite so I should be home sometime in March. I’m really having a hard time writing letters down here. I owe at least 4 thank-you letters for packages sent to me and haven’t even sent them. I can’t really think of much to say except that I won’t believe I’m coming home til I’m there.

Don’t worry, I’m still a good little boy. I trust you are being good too. A guy I met down here, and he is a nice guy …

What the letter records

The 10-month tour confirmation. “I’ve heard the 10-month tour is definite so I should be home sometime in March.” The 10-month tour was the Vietnamization-era policy that shortened Army deployment tours from the standard 12 months. By late 1970 the drawdown was political reality: combat units were being withdrawn on a published timetable that the Cambodia incursion and Kent State had accelerated, and the Army was clearing tour rosters of soldiers whose home-station replacements had been cancelled. The 10-month tour was both a morale gesture and a practical mechanism for reducing in-country head-count without retraining replacement cohorts.

For Charlie, the policy meant home in March 1971 instead of mid-1971. “I should be home sometime in March” — based on a March 1970 deployment, the 10-month drop puts him at mid-March 1971 give or take administrative slack. This was, on 31 December 1970, the most concrete piece of return-date information he had received in months.

The decision he was about to walk away from. Three weeks later, by the 19 January 1971 ETS-extension strategy letter, Charlie had reasoned through the trade-off and chosen the other path. The 10-month drop would have put him home in mid-March 1971 with about three months of garrison duty remaining stateside. The ETS-extension strategy — staying in Vietnam an extra three months — would let him discharge directly from country on 14 June 1971 with no stateside garrison duty at all. The trade was three months in Vietnam now for three months out of the Army at the end.

This 31 December letter records the moment before that decision was made. Charlie had heard the 10-month drop was definite. He was, at this point, planning to take it.

The ‘I won’t believe I’m coming home til I’m there’ note. “I won’t believe I’m coming home til I’m there.” The line is the small piece of soldier-realism that runs through the corpus. Charlie had been disappointed too many times by Army rumors and pending-decisions, the closest of which had been the late-1970 Hawaii-R&R cancellation rumor that the Dec 16 1970 enlisted men’s club letter had registered. “I’ve been disappointed too many times to really get my hopes too high but I’m still hoping” — the same register, two weeks later in the same place.

The 4 thank-you letters owed. “I owe at least 4 thank-you letters for packages sent to me and haven’t even sent them.” The small piece of practical-life accounting. The corpus contains multiple Peggy-to-Charlie packages, several from Terrie, and at least one from Dorothy Hauser per the mid-1970 letter that mentions her “goodies in her letters.” Charlie’s December backlog of unsent thank-you notes is the small inverse-corpus piece: the letters that should have existed and didn’t.

Sequence with surrounding letters

The 31 December letter is the before-state of the ETS-extension decision. Three weeks of more thinking, and the trade became clear to him: better to stay in Vietnam three more months and discharge cleanly than to come home and pull garrison duty. The 10-month drop was real; Charlie just chose not to take it.

Source: grandmaE1.pdf page 225 (gitignored locally; transcribed content surfaced here).