Archive for October 2025

Today in our third letter from Charlie, we find a serviceman stuck at his desk preparing liberty passes for a hundred men who’d get to go ashore while he stayed behind. What follows is a letter home that’s honest about the small frustrations of military life: the paperwork that never ends, the income tax forms that make no sense, and a quiet victory over a commanding officer that Charlie knows better than to mention out loud!

While the world was at war, Charlie was missing Charlotte. In this rain-soaked letter, he writes with ink-stained fingers, a quick wit, and a tender heart, remembering a movie date, wondering about her health, and holding tight to the small rituals that made love feel close, even across the miles.

In July 1944, just a month after Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, Charlie got the orders that would upend everything—a transfer to Norfolk that meant scrambling to find new plans, battling phone delays, and watching their carefully arranged leave dissolve into uncertainty. What follows is a letter written in a flurry of nerves and exhaustion, full of apologies, logistics, and the ache of remembering that exactly one month ago, they were thinking of getting married. This is our fifth and final letter from Charlie—leaving us to wonder whether he and Charlotte ever made it to that altar, whether Norfolk became home, and what became of two people whose love survived wartime uncertainty one letter at a time.

In May 1944, just weeks before D-Day would change the course of history, Charlie sat down to write his darling with a pounding headache, a shorthand test looming, and a watch that seemed to be timing him for some cosmic joke. What follows is a letter that captures the grinding tedium of waiting for orders, waiting for his commander to give straight answers, waiting to get back to Washington, and waiting to just feel like himself again.

A young Navy recruit at Bainbridge Naval Training Station pens a letter to his girlfriend with equal parts homesick, hopeful, and humor-filled offering a rare, heartfelt glimpse into love, duty, and life during wartime.