Letter to Terrie, 5 April 1971 — 'Mom suggested that we get married in Hawaii and save everyone all the bother'

What the letter is

5 April 1971. Two days after the parental-propriety flare-up of 2–3 April 1971 — the Wildermuth-side objection to Terrie meeting her unmarried boyfriend in Honolulu for a week in a hotel — Charlie writes a short, plain letter. The April 2-3 letter had recorded the conflict. This one records his Eesley-side mother’s proposed solution.

Transcription

April 5

Dear Terrie,

Sorry for the lapse in writing. I did write a letter to your parents. I said I would call you the 9 or 10th and that the decision on meeting is left up to you. I do love you and would want to see you.

Mom suggested that we get married in Hawaii and save everyone all the bother but later on. That isn’t what I really want although I guess we will be married soon enough.

I now have 70 days left in the army. If rumors are correct I may only have 40. 70 is probably the more correct number.

I love you and hope to see you in Hawaii.

Love, Charles

What the letter records

Peggy McMaster Eesley’s proposed Hawaii marriage. “Mom suggested that we get married in Hawaii and save everyone all the bother but later on.” This is the single line that materially shifts the parental-propriety story the archive has been carrying. The April 2-3 letter had told the Wildermuth side of the problem — Terrie’s parents objecting to her flying to Hawaii to meet Charlie unmarried. This letter tells the Eesley-side response: Peggy McMaster Eesley proposed that Charlie and Terrie marry in Hawaii during R&R and resolve the parental objection that way.

It is a strategically clean solution. By marrying during the R&R week, Charlie and Terrie would convert what the Wildermuth side could call an unmarried-couple-at-a-hotel problem into a honeymoon, and remove every parental objection on either side. Peggy was, in 1970, the Eesley-side mother of a Vietnam-deployed son, watching her son and his girlfriend’s parents arrive at an impasse over what was meant to be a week’s reunion at the midpoint of a tour. Her proposed solution honors both the moral and practical instincts she would have brought from her own generation: marriage is the framework that makes the trip respectable, and respectability is the framework that lets the trip happen.

Charlie’s answer: a careful no. “That isn’t what I really want although I guess we will be married soon enough.” Charlie is twenty-three, in his second month of a Vietnam tour, with seventy days left in the army by his then-current count. He loves Terrie; he expects they will marry; he isn’t willing to compress the wedding into an R&R-week resolution to his parents’ anxiety. The phrasing is the same dry, slightly tired register he carries through the rest of the corpus — understated, careful, with the small emphasis on “really want” that suggests he had thought it through before writing back.

The decision on meeting is left up to Terrie. “I said I would call you the 9 or 10th and that the decision on meeting is left up to you. I do love you and would want to see you.” Charlie is leaving the R&R-meeting decision in Terrie’s hands — consistent with the April 2-3 letter’s framing of the parental fight as one she would need to navigate with her own parents. The proposed phone call on the 9th or 10th of April from Saigon to Maryland would be the first synchronous conversation either of them had had in weeks.

The countdown. “I now have 70 days left in the army. If rumors are correct I may only have 40. 70 is probably the more correct number.” The same accountancy of days that runs through every Vietnam letter Charlie wrote — the 711 days left of late 1969, the 17 days left of 29 May 1970, the 145 days at the most of 21 January 1971. Here, 70 is the working number. If correct, that puts his projected ETS at mid-June 1970 — aligned with the original tour-end window, before the January 1971 ETS-extension decision that would push it later by nine months. “70 is probably the more correct number” is the honest hedge.

What this letter changes in the archive

The site’s existing framing on Peggy McMaster Eesley’s role in the Hawaii-R&R period was thin: she was the one organizing the military-spouse-orders reduced fare for Terrie and presumably navigating the Eesley-side family conversations about the trip. This letter shows that she was actively brokering a marriage-in-Hawaii solution — the kind of intervention that, had Charlie taken her up on it, would have made the rest of his tour and the rest of his life a different shape. The R&R-week-as-honeymoon plan was on the table. Charlie said no. They married, instead, on the other side of the tour, after he came home.

The line “That isn’t what I really want although I guess we will be married soon enough” is, in its plain way, one of the small key moments of Charlie’s tour. The archive should carry it.

Sequence with surrounding letters

Source: grandmaE1.pdf page 4 (gitignored locally; transcribed content surfaced here). The grandmaE1.pdf source is, on present evidence, a higher-fidelity scan of the Vietnam letter collection than the dad-numbered scans this archive has been working from — the pages appear to be Peggy McMaster Eesley’s preserved copies of Charlie’s letters, with about 503 pages in the document.