Battle Stars

The letter that Mom and Dad mailed to Cleon with part of my address on the envelope must have kept the post office department jumping for a good two months! That is what is known as getting a letter “the hard way”. Well, he did eventually get it, and that is something. I hope Mom won’t take any ribbing over that because such errors are easy enough to make (for us people who do a lot of writing!). I’ve come close to making a similar mistake once or twice. For example, I must be careful to use a somewhat different return address when writing Jayne. When addressing an envelope to me, she must substitute “c/o U.S. Army” for “c/o PM, New York”, otherwise the letter might possibly go to New York and then have to come back. That’s getting a letter the hard way, too! The set up is complicated enough as it is. You see, Jayne’s letters to me start out in the British Postal System, and at some point along the line they are turned over to the U.S. Army Postal System, which takes over the job of delivering them to me. The reverse is true when I post a letter to Jayne: I must put a British 2 ½ pence stamp on it (!) and drop it into the Army mailbox, and it is later turned over to the British for delivery.

So “Heffie” has already returned to the states, eh?   Good for him! You know, I believe he has enough points to be discharged. He’s been in the Army 38 or 40 months, overseas at least 33 months, and probably has some “battle stars”, worth 5 points each toward discharge! Battle stars are one of the biggest (and bitterest) jokes of the war – the Army does not distribute them at all fairly. I think men in combat should get them and no one else! But they have been given to many thousands of men holding down desk jobs in the Eighth and Ninth Air Forces, men who were no more engaged in combat than I have been, men who have been doing the same work that we in the Air Service Command have been doing. In fact, Air Service Command personnel are about the only ones who didn’t get the battle stars! I don’t care about being “decorated”, but they might help me get out a little sooner.

A recent letter of Cleon’s is a dilly. I can’t help but feel that he has grown up a lot since I left home – the Army and Navy are the places to do it! I can’t get over the way he is always taking off from his camp — going out on liberty whenever he can! Don’t get me wrong. I am definitely in favor of it; it’s the proper thing to do, keeps up morale, makes the time go more rapidly, and all that. But, in that respect, he is quite different from me, for I am a terrible stayathome boy — that is, I was before I met Jayne, and I will be from now on). Maybe it can be explained by the fact that I was in the states so short a time and had no real buddy there. It’s different overseas. Speaking of time going by rapidly, that last month in Northern Ireland was the shortest one I’ve ever seen!!

My, but I’ve had a lot of enjoyment out of the things that my family has written about “Jayne and I”—- it’s really good. Cleon thought we must be damn good friends by now! Ha Ha! That smart boy said one darn smart thing in the letter: “Numerous circumstances will keep it a platonic friendship”. How true! One of those circumstances, my coming to England, has already been realized.

My family seems to be very curious about a pin that Jayne was wearing over her left pocket in a picture that I sent home, so I will tell all. The pin has the letters “MN” on it, standing (she said) for the (British) Merchant Navy. She was forever kidding me about she liked all the Navy boys, “each and every one of them”, she’d say! Perhaps she wore that to make me jealous? We don’t give these girls of ours half-enough credit sometimes! Anyway, in time I trained Jayne to wear my winged-propeller lapel insignia, and her sister Jay wears my “U.S.” lapel button. Jayne has already written that she’s sorry she teased me about the Navy – the Air Corp is now here favorite, and if I were in the Infantry, that would be her favorite, she says. What some girls won’t say to cheer up a fellow a long way from home!

I’ve been in England only twelve days, and already Jayne wants to know if I can get a furlough while I’m here and go back to Belfast and see her! Cute kid, eh? At the moment she is taking her two weeks vacation at Bangor, N.I. She and her mother and sister went on their “holidays” on the 7th; they will probably return to Belfast on the 22nd. A few days before I left, Jayne explained to me exactly what busses, trams, and trains I should take in order to visit her in Bangor during those two weeks.

I guess there’s no harm in my telling you that Jayne was very sorry to see me leave N.I. I knew that Sunday (July 1st) would probably be my last opportunity to go to town, so I went in to say “So long”. During my last hour or so with her, Jayne was so upset that she could hardly talk or look me in the eye. The next day she somehow talked our operators into putting her call thru to me (contrary to recent post regulations), and she apologized for being “poor company” the previous evening. She also told me that she had gotten up early that morning and had written me a letter before breakfast, explaining why she acted as she did Sunday night. And she wrote again that same evening. Both letters were sent special delivery (there’s no such animal in the Army Postal set-up), but I didn’t get them until the end of the week in England. I felt terrible after reading her letters. Judging from what she said, I gather that she just got into the house in time Sunday night. And she says she “broke down again” when she arrived at the office Monday morning. Everyone in the department wanted to know what was wrong, and the girls were bathing her eyes, and I wonder what the heck all. Anyway, the entire thing was very depressing. Sometimes I think I did wrong in ever going out with her.

I wasn’t going to mention any of this, but now that I have, I’m sure that you’ll realize that it’s “personal” to me – and a secret between us.

[letterstohome copyright 2008]

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