Letter to Terrie, mid-1970 — 'I'm carrying the machine gun now. It weighs 25 lbs. I haven't used it and hope I never do.'

What the letter is

Mid-1970. Charlie writes Terrie from the field after some rough days — “no contact” with the enemy, going through the jungle, ending a three-week dry spell that has just broken with rain. He carries on the same sheet two future-shaping pieces of content: the M-60 machine gun rotation he has just been handed, and the first written sentence of the Marietta wedding planning that would land thirteen months later.

Transcription (mid-letter; opening and closing pages not yet sampled)

We have had some rough days lately (no contact) going through the jungle. It has been raining lately after about a 3 week dry spell.

It should be a near right tonight though. I’m carrying the machine gun now. It weighs 25 lbs and is damn heavy after awhile. I haven’t used it and hope I never do.

We are not in the [DMZ?] now nor have we been. The only allies there are the S. Vietn., which is where they constantly … I don’t know whether it makes any difference or not though.

I guess I’ll have to have the other ring cut down to size when I get back. You can plan on Marietta for the wedding if you like. I know my parents want to entertain. You can write any considerate things with them. It can be as large as you can afford.

I have Hartz’s address … so I guess I’ll write him when I have time. It is getting dark now and I’ll write more later.

What the letter records

The M-60 machine gun. “I’m carrying the machine gun now. It weighs 25 lbs and is damn heavy after awhile. I haven’t used it and hope I never do.” The M-60 was the standard U.S. squad-level belt-fed 7.62 mm machine gun of the Vietnam war — carried by one designated infantry soldier per squad, with the rest of the squad serving as assistant gunners or ammo bearers. The 25-pound weight Charlie names tracks; the gun in its ready-to-fire configuration ran 23–26 pounds depending on the variant. Being assigned the M-60 placed Charlie at the literal spear-tip of his unit’s rotation: the M-60 gunner moved at the center of the squad’s fire-team, had to set up the gun whenever the unit took contact, and was a primary target on the other side. The line “I haven’t used it and hope I never do” is the small honest piece of self-knowledge Charlie consistently writes about his combat role: he wasn’t there voluntarily, he wasn’t enthusiastic, and he hoped to discharge having never fired it in anger.

The transition months later to the Da Nang office and the 4 February 1971 Laos fore-warning register made him glad to be one remove from this kind of duty — “I’m really glad that I’m out of the field” — reads against this mid-1970 letter as the same person, six months later, having succeeded in trading the M-60 carry for a rear-area office.

The Marietta wedding plan, written from the bush. “You can plan on Marietta for the wedding if you like. I know my parents want to entertain. You can write any considerate things with them. It can be as large as you can afford.” This is the first written reference in the corpus to the Marietta wedding that would happen in August 1971, after Charlie’s June 14 1971 ETS. Will and Peggy Eesley had a 5,000-square-foot designed-and-built home at Highland Ridge Road in Lowell, just outside Marietta, that was built to host extended-family events; their offer to “entertain” a Marietta-side wedding was the natural one for Terrie to take up. Charlie’s quiet “as large as you can afford” defers the scale decision to Terrie and the Wildermuth-side budget, while signalling the Eesley-side stands ready to absorb the host duties. The wedding, when it landed, would happen in this register.

That Charlie wrote both lines — the M-60 rotation and the wedding plan — on the same piece of paper, on the same evening, in the same letter is what makes the letter remarkable. The two halves of his future are pressed together with no transition.

The dry spell ending. “It has been raining lately after about a 3 week dry spell.” I Corps climate ran wet-and-dry monsoon cycles; a three-week dry spell in the bush meant manageable water-table conditions for foot patrols but also intense heat. The rains breaking it would have produced the standard tropical-storm pattern that the rest of the corpus describes in detail. The detail places the letter in the late-spring / early-summer transition period, July or early August 1970.

Hartz. “I have Hartz’s address … so I guess I’ll write him when I have time.” Hartz is most likely a Marietta High School classmate or NCO school friend Charlie was in touch with by mail. The reference is incidental.

Sequence with surrounding letters

The dating is approximate — the letter sits in the mid-1970 summer field rotation, between the early July letters and the September malaria episode. A tighter date will surface once the opening and closing pages of this letter are extracted from grandmaE1.pdf.

Source: grandmaE1.pdf page 345 (gitignored locally; transcribed content surfaced here). Mid-letter sheet; opening and closing pages not yet sampled in this archive.