Letter to Terrie, 19 January 1971 — 'I'm going to extend 32 or 33 days so I ETS from here'

What the letter is

19 January 1971. Charlie writes Terrie from a rear-area Vietnam base — almost certainly Camp Eagle or Da Nang, given that he was pulled back from the field by this point in the tour. He has been waiting for word on what the Army’s policy will be for early discharge (“drops”) and has decided that if nothing definite comes through, he will take matters into his own hands.

The decision he is announcing is counterintuitive on first read: he is going to extend his Vietnam tour by 32 or 33 days so he can ETS (Expiration Term of Service) directly from Vietnam rather than rotate back to the States and serve out the remainder of his Army time in garrison. The math is simple: a few extra weeks in Vietnam saves him months of stateside harassment. He has already heard from buddies that stateside duty is no better than another field tour.

Transcription

Jan 19

Dear Terrie,

I got 2 letters from you today. I still haven’t heard any word on drops so I’ve made up my mind that if they don’t tell me anything definite I’m going to extend 32 or 33 days so I ETS from here. I don’t think I’m going to like stateside duty as from what I hear it is a lot of harassment.

I figured that if I extend now I’ll have 147 days left now and 129 when I finally get back to the field if they need us back as I hear they are. With leave and R&R I can kill about 30 days out of the field and a few other things should mean that at most I’ll have about 80 possible days in the field and probably less. With the weather changing and little or no contact it really shouldn’t be that bad. It all depends though on whether they say something definite about drops.

I can drink over here anytime. There is a bar on base here and it is the only one we go to. Also the P.X. sells…

[Page 2 is not in the archive. Page 3 resumes mid-sentence.]

…a lot of flares. It should get pretty noisy around [Tet] as it was noisy on X-mas & New Years. (They lit up the sky with flares.) I have only tried a few puffs of marijuana back at [Camp] Evans and I was drunk at the time. I really don’t go for it and neither do most around me, but it is widespread as are other drugs. The kids will try to sell it to us through the fence along with anything else they have to sell. Also they want to buy our cigarettes as it costs us 1¢ each and them around 95[¢].

As far as your thinking marijuana is dangerous, I don’t think so at all. I just hate smoking of all kinds, and the army is cracking down on it and I don’t want any more trouble besides.

[A passage here, on the couple’s private life, is withheld as private.]

What’s all this bull about you loafing your last semester and me paying it. You are really dreaming now aren’t you. Maybe I should stay over here an extra year to earn enough money to pay for all my expenses that will be waiting for me when I get back.

[A further private passage is withheld.]

Well I hope you do alright on your finals and finally become a senior. I doubt if you will ever graduate though. Keep plugging — maybe one of these years they might give you a diploma just to get rid of you. At least [Leshe] & Ferguson started two years before you and they are still in school.

What the letter records

The ETS-from-Vietnam strategy. The Army’s standard practice was to rotate soldiers back from Vietnam at the end of their tour and then assign them to a stateside unit for the remainder of their Army time. For a draftee or short-tour enlistee, this meant several months of garrison duty after the tour — inspections, parades, training, the bureaucratic harassment Charlie names. Soldiers who could extend their Vietnam tour by enough days to cover their remaining Army time could skip the stateside step entirely and discharge directly from Vietnam. Charlie’s 32-or-33-day extension is exactly that calculation.

The 80-days-in-the-field number. Charlie’s math projects 147 days left in the army at the moment of writing, 129 once back from the field, and at most 80 days remaining in the field after leave, R&R, and other deductions. The framing is the same accountancy of the tour that runs through the corpus: every form of leave subtracted, every contact day counted, the goal to minimize exposure across the last stretch.

The pairing with Peggy’s letter. Three weeks after this letter, Charlie’s mother Peggy McMaster Eesley writes her 10 February 1971 letter to Terrie enclosing a final letter from the CO at Camp Eagle to Congressman Clarence Miller. The Eesley family was working both the soldier’s-side extension strategy (Charlie planning his own days) and the parental-side congressional intervention (Peggy writing to the family’s U.S. Representative) in parallel. Charlie’s January 19 calculation and Peggy’s February 10 letter are the two ends of the same family strategy for the final months of the tour.

The bar on base. “I can drink over here anytime. There is a bar on base here and it is the only one we go to.” Charlie is no longer in the field; he is in the rear, with a bar accessible. The rear-area location matches the later 4 February and 10 February 1971 letters that open “I’m still in Danang.”

The fence drug-economy and the cigarette arbitrage. Pages 3–4 add a rare firsthand economic snapshot of the rear-area base. Charlie describes local kids selling marijuana — “and anything else they have to sell” — through the perimeter fence, and wanting to buy the GIs’ cigarettes, which cost the soldiers one cent each at the PX and roughly ninety-five cents on the local market. It is a small, precise picture of the informal economy that grew up along every American perimeter in Vietnam: subsidized PX goods flowing out through the wire at a hundred-fold markup, drugs flowing in. Charlie is dismissive of marijuana’s danger but says he “just hate[s] smoking of all kinds” and, with an ETS extension pending, “[doesn’t] want any more trouble.” He also notes the holiday flares — the sky lit up over Tet as it had been over Christmas and New Year’s.

Pages 3–4 survive in the family archive (page 2 has not been located). Two passages on those pages — on the couple’s private life — are withheld here as private, in keeping with the archive’s handling of the intimate courtship correspondence; the war-and-life material around them is transcribed above.

Pages 3–4 held in the family archive as dad152 and dad153; page 2 not located. Two private passages withheld.