Jake promised he’d write, and he did.  Not often, but sometimes. He was a bad speller and had horrible handwriting, but he did write, just like he said he would. And he always asked me to write him back, to let him know what was going on in my life. Was I okay? What was I up to?  Things like that. And so I wrote him. I wrote to him about graduating nursing school, and I wrote to him about my time working at the VA, where I met a few guys who had been in the Ia Drang, which spooked me. A lot.

And I wrote to him when I decided to volunteer for Vietnam.

It was January of 1967 and Thomas was already over there—along with about 480,000 other troops. Thomas was based in Pleiku, doing things he wouldn’t tell me about with people he said he couldn’t...

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