Letters to the Jungle: A Memoir of my Father’s war

When I was 9 years old, my father left the family for a year-long tour in Vietnam. He was dropped into a clearing in the jungle just outside of Saigon and was tasked with building what became the largest supply depot in South Vietnam. Staying behind were my two sisters, my mother, his mother, and me. The five of us each wrote a weekly letter to him. My dad saved every one of those letters, more than 250. At the end of his tour of duty, he hauled them back to the states and tossed them into a footlocker. Years went by before I finally dug them out and read them. 

The letters completely upended my life. In a good way. Sort of. 

This memoir, based on those letters to my dad plus a precious handful from him back to us in the States, shows a close knit family that was shredding right along with the rest of the country. I saw my father become disillusioned and bitter, exhausted from trying to do a dangerous job with contradictory and incompetent orders coming in from Washington and Saigon. Back in Oklahoma, it slowly dawned on my mother that she did not really enjoy being a single mom. She would disappear for days at a time, leaving the three daughters to pretty much raise ourselves. My mom and my grandmother feuded over money, us kids, and table manners. My oldest sister escaped from the house with her friends, my middle sister hid in her room with her books, and I tried, and spectacularly failed, to be the best little girl in the world. 

The letters are full of minutia about golf scores and arithmetic tests and astronauts and homecoming parades and jokes from Reader’s Digest. The letters also talk of snipers and Agent Orange and deadly bombings and civil rights protests and shocking murders in our own hometown.  

“Letters to the Jungle” is a blend of “Tour of Duty” meets “Little Women”, if perhaps Marmee was more like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. And with a grandmother who channeled Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

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