Letter to Terrie, 31 March 1971 — Hawaii R&R planning, two months out

What the letter is

31 March 1971. Nine days after Charlie’s 22 March 1971 R&R-orders letter, responding to a 24 March letter from Terrie saying she has her ticket for Hawaii R&R already in hand. By the time of the 29 May ‘seventeen days left’ letter two months later, the trip will be close to imminent, but here it is still nearly two weeks out and the logistics are being settled.

Transcription

March 31

Dear Terrie,

I got your letter of March 24 saying you were coming. Also you said you have your ticket. I hope you can get some benefit from the orders with Mrs. Eesley and get a reduced fare somehow.

I know Mrs. Young but that was all very long ago and I don’t remember her. Also her daughter (good friend of my parents) has just recently died, so I doubt if we will be with them at all. We will be staying away from everything military which includes the R&R center as much as possible. We will meet there, however.

[page 2:] Your letter is a little bit disturbing in that, now that you have been free from your parents you feel you must tell them to let you completely alone. This trip isn’t so damn important that we have to ruin relations with your parents. You could have tactfully told them what our plans are and asked them to accept it, but I do hope you didn’t call them childish if they don’t.

After we are married we probably won’t see them that much but that is no reason to be on bad terms with them.

My mother is basically against us meeting like this too but she realizes there is nothing she can do. She suggested I write your parents and explain to them why we are meeting. I guess I will now.

[page 3:] I do want to meet you. I guess we will have a lot of things to talk about.

I still love you. I just wish it isn’t as bad as your letter indicates, about your parents.

I’m bringing about $400. I can make reservations there. From what I hear it is no problem. Do you have enough money to get a room after you get there? I hope so.

Well keep studying.

Love, Charles

What the letter records

The R&R-planning timeline. The 24 March 1971 letter from Terrie that Charlie is responding to — already with her ticket purchased — establishes that the Hawaii R&R was settled, on the calendar, and being logistically organized by late March 1971, eleven weeks ahead of the actual trip in mid-June. This is two letters into Charlie’s Vietnam tour. The 2–3 April 1970 letter about the Wildermuth-side parental fight — Terrie’s parents objecting to her flying to Hawaii to meet her unmarried boyfriend for a week in a hotel — would land three days later. The R&R was already a settled fact in Charlie and Terrie’s correspondence by the time the Wildermuth-side objection arrived.

Peggy’s military-spouse orders. “I hope you can get some benefit from the orders with Mrs. Eesley and get a reduced fare somehow.” The “Mrs. Eesley” here is Charlie’s mother Peggy McMaster Eesley — and “the orders” appears to refer to military-spouse travel paperwork that could get a deployed soldier’s family a discounted fare. Charlie’s family on the Eesley side was helping Terrie organize the logistics in parallel with their own concerns about the trip. The detail is the earliest visible instance in the corpus of the Eesley-Wildermuth-Terrie-the-girlfriend operational coordination that would run through the rest of the tour.

Mrs. Young. A cameo: Mrs. Young’s daughter, a “good friend of my parents,” has recently died, and Charlie and Terrie will therefore not be staying with the Young family during R&R. The Youngs are not otherwise documented in this archive. The two-sentence aside is the only mention of them in the Vietnam corpus so far. The line “I don’t remember her” about Mrs. Young herself, while still mentioning her daughter’s death as recent and relevant, has the quiet sadness — and brief acknowledgment — of these kinds of letters’ compressed registers.

“Stay away from everything military.” Charlie’s framing of the R&R — that they will avoid the official R&R center and “everything military” as much as possible, meeting at the R&R center only because they have to — is the small but real assertion of the privacy of the trip in advance. Hawaii was meant to be a week with Terrie, not a week with the Army.

Pages 2-3, recovered June 2026 — the parental conflict starts here. The page-1-only version of this letter showed none of it, but the recovered pages place the start of the Hawaii-parental-conflict thread on 31 March, not 2 April. Charlie reacts to a “disturbing” letter from Terrie about cutting her parents off — “this trip isn’t so damn important that we have to ruin relations with your parents” — records his own mother’s resigned opposition and her suggestion that he write Terrie’s parents himself (“I guess I will now”), and closes on the practical (“I’m bringing about $400… Do you have enough money to get a room after you get there?”). The 2-3 April letter and the 5 April mom-suggested-marriage letter are now visibly continuations of a conversation that opens in this letter’s recovered pages.

Sequence with surrounding letters

The R&R itself would come in mid-June 1970, ten weeks after Terrie’s ticket purchase.