WHEN THE CHILDREN were at school we sat at our desk typing letters to our mothers. Bobby does the darndest things! Frank keeps busy at work. We girls have a knitting circle now. We edited out our fear, anger, and loneliness for our mothers, who had sons overseas, who were anxious enough.
OUR MOTHERS WROTE to us and said they were enclosing chocolate-covered raisins and when their letters arrived without the raisins we assumed the censors, which were other wives just like us, or maybe the WACs, had eaten them.
OUR PARENTS WROTE to us and asked, What is it like there? When can we visit? When are you coming home? And we replied, Soon, I hope, or, I don’t know, or, We are in the West. The weather is fine! Or we did not reply because we did not know what to say, really.
AND OUR BROTHERS wrote us letters that arrived with postmarks from two months prior. Our brothers described the first time they shot and killed a man and the pistol they kept as a souvenir. Our brothers said: It is odd how hard one becomes after a little bit of this stuff, but it gets to be more like killing mad dogs than people. We replied with sympathetic sentences—I cannot imagine what you are going through over there—we replied with suggestions they could not possibly agree to—Take care of yourself. Be safe. We signed our names as we always did—With Love, Sis, or with more formality—Fondly, Dottie McDougal. Mostly, we could not understand what our brothers were experiencing because we had never experienced it ourselves, just as, perhaps, they could not understand us.