Introduction
It started with a letter; one simple unsuspecting note, written in haste and with little regard for grammar or punctuation. It only traveled a short distance, but it has taken me on a journey covering thousands of miles to foreign lands and revealing surprising stories. This letter changed my life.
Has there ever been a time in your life when you didn’t have a direction or focus? Well, that was my dilemma in 2014. I had been searching my soul for almost a year. I had recently retired from a rewarding public service career and was struggling to discover my new purpose. I had even joked that I wanted God to text me, so I would know what He wanted me to do next. I kept praying for an answer, a sign, or anything that would point me in the right direction. However, as I eventually learned, God doesn’t always use a smartphone to provide answers. Instead, He sent me wonderful, old-fashioned snail mail…more than four hundred letters to be exact.
These letters were not sent directly to me; rather they were written by my father to my mother. Their correspondence started early in their courtship and continued throughout his entire three year, ten month service in the US Army. True to her generation, my mother had saved his letters and more. Yet, I was not even aware that I had them, and I had no idea that they would be the answer to my prayers.
When we moved Mom into an assisted-living facility and sold her home of sixty years, we shipped all her personal papers to Arizona, where I had a second home. At that time, I still had a demanding full-time job, traveled for work, and spent time with Mom in Tennessee. Since I didn’t think there was anything of real significance in the boxes, I didn’t bother to examine the contents. Ten years later when I retired and had more free time, I realized it was time to clean closets and open those boxes. I was somewhat curious about the contents, and that’s when I made an amazing discovery. I found hundreds of perfectly preserved letters, her diaries and scrapbooks detailing my parents’ lives during the war years. As I sat on the dusty floor, slowly reading the letters, I was touched, moved, and surprised by what I had uncovered. Almost immediately, I knew I wanted to share their story.
Letters, Love and Longing: My Parents’ WWII Story is not about battles, strategies, or politics. Rather it is about two young adults from East Tennessee, loving, supporting, and communicating with each other in spite of great distances (9,000 miles), slow mail service, and a three-year separation. With these letters, I indeed found my new purpose plus an amazing opportunity to intimately know my father and mother against the backdrop of World War II.
I had faint childhood memories about my dad’s military service, but somehow I knew he had served in WWII and spent some time in a place called “New Guinea.” As a child born in 1946, I was surrounded by cousins and friends who were the same age, but no one ever talked about the war. It was mainly through my dad’s membership in the local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and American Legion that I got a sense of his connection to that war and to the other local men who had served. Our family often attended the VFW “Fish Fries” where fish and hush puppies were deep-fried in large five-gallon metal vats over an open fire. Savoring this tasty Southern comfort food, I heard snippets of war stories. However, these comments had little impact on my understanding of my father’s role in that war.
My mother was also active in the American Legion Auxiliary, a group of women and wives who had also been impacted by the war. But the focus was rarely about the past, rather their conversations were here and now. These were all men and women who had lived through the anxious times of separation, rationed food, limited household goods, and gas supplies. However, they had quickly put that behind them and were busy building their postwar lives in East Tennessee.
As I got older, I remember selling Buddy Poppies, the official memorial flower of the VFW, to customers at my father’s workplace. Yet, I did not fully understand that the red poppy was, and still is, a symbol of sacrifice of those who died in military service. Sadly, more than 400,000 Americans paid that ultimate sacrifice in WWII. I was just a young girl, proud to be with my daddy and selling those paper flowers.
My parents, however, did have a close friend who understood firsthand the significance of the red poppy, as her husband was killed in action in France. Pregnant at the time, she named her son after his father and raised him alone. They had much support from their family and community, and we often included them in our social activities. Yet, I remember even at a young age that I was very sad that my friend never got to know his daddy.
Except for those few experiences, I never felt directly impacted by my father’s service in WWII. Little did I know how many people, including my own family, were touched by the war even in our small, rural East Tennessee community. Until recently I had not fully grasped the significant role that Oak Ridge, the Atomic City and neighboring town, had played in ending the war and bringing my father home. There was so much I was about to learn.
Fast forward to 1968, the year I graduated from college, got married and moved away to begin my new life as a teacher and wife in Louisville, Kentucky. My parents were happy that one daughter had been successfully launched and that their other daughter was now a sophomore in college. They were starting to experience a freedom they had not enjoyed for more than thirty years. So it was a shock to us all when my father died unexpectedly that October from a cerebral hemorrhage at the young age of sixty.
I was so distraught by his sudden death that the only thing I remember from the service was the military graveside ceremony, complete with a twenty-one gun salute, the playing of taps, and Mom receiving the U.S. flag that had been draped over his coffin. Since I had not attended many funerals, I did not understand the significance of this military tradition, nor did I recognize his many Army buddies who came to say their final goodbyes. His burial that fall day closed any opportunity for me to know my dad as an adult…or so I thought.
But that all changed thirty years later when I moved to San Francisco to work for the US Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau. Slowly and unexpectedly, curiosity about my father’s WWII service began to grow. What I knew about his service was limited to these few facts: He was in the Army, he was stationed in the Pacific in New Guinea, and his tour kept him separated from his wife for several years. Surprisingly, other clues about his Army life were scattered throughout the Bay Area, and eventually my work helped me find them.
When I first started working for the Women’s Bureau, the Rosie the Riveter Memorial was just being completed in Richmond, California, and I was part of the planning team for the dedication. Together we collaborated with the local tradeswomen and the City of Richmond on the event at the Marina Bay Park, site of the former Kaiser shipyards. This memorial was our nation’s first to honor and celebrate the contributions of American women on the WW II home front. Attending were over a hundred “Rosies,” including many returning to Richmond for the first time since the war ended. As these women told their stories about welding and building 747 liberty ships, more than any other shipyard in the US, I wondered if my father had been on one of those.
At that moment, I felt a strong connection to these women whose skills and labor had provided my father and other service members their solid, dependable transportation that literally carried them around the world and back. The Navy troopship, USS Admiral E.W. Eberle, built in Alameda, California, did eventually carry my dad back to Long Beach. From there, he began his final cross-county trek to his wife in East Tennessee. At that event in 2000, I felt that a seed had been planted to learn more about my father’s service and his military life.
Several other work initiatives further piqued my interest in his WWII service. While it may seem strange, one of these initiatives was a project that addressed women veterans experiencing homelessness. With California home to the largest number of women veterans in the US and a high percentage of them homeless; our local office became one of the key players in a new Women Veterans Initiative. Our team worked tirelessly to better understand the returning women veterans’ issues and to create solutions, resources, and programs for them. We even hosted the first California Stand Down for women veterans in Long Beach. At that time, I wasn’t even aware that my dad had landed in Long Beach on his return from the Pacific in 1945. Most likely, I was even on the same site where he had finally and gratefully returned to the US.
As part of this project, our agency explored the role “trauma” played in the women veterans’ ability to successfully return to civilian life. Working with the National Center on Family Homelessness, we helped develop the Trauma-Informed Care Guide that included best practices and strategies to effectively support returning women veterans. While the impact of military trauma had not yet been fully understood nor adequately addressed, I started to wonder about my father’s traumatic experiences. Were his service-related traumas acknowledged and what help, if any, had been available to him and other vets? Was their eventual coping strategy their weekly drinking and card-playing sessions at the VFW? So many unanswered questions kept surfacing as I worked with the women veteran population. But it would take one more unexpected event to help me understand the complicated issues men and women veterans often face returning to civilian life.
Shortly after these programs ended, I decided to retire from my forty-five year public service career. Unexpectedly but happily, my retirement plans were short-lived when I was invited to Washington, DC, to work on a special women veteran employment project with the US Department of Labor as a follow-up to my previous efforts. While the focus was on women veterans and employment issues, I could not help but wonder again about my father and the challenges he faced after spending almost three years in the uncivilized jungles of New Guinea. In DC, I quickly became immersed in the veteran culture and scrambled to learn and experience as much as I could to provide sustainable resources and programs for women veterans.
This was exciting and satisfying work that helped me appreciate, perhaps for the first time, the significance of our military and its service members. Again my thoughts turned to my father and his service, and I realized there was so much that I still did not know about this life. I was especially shocked to learn that there were no transition services for people leaving active duty when WWII ended. After the soldiers were discharged, often in places far from home, they quickly boarded trains and buses and headed straight back to their loved ones and families.
This was definitely true for my father. On December 6, 1945, after he was honorably discharged at Ft Chaffee, Arkansas, he boarded a bus to Memphis, then another to Knoxville which finally brought him home to his wife in Maryville. Once he arrived, there were no support services for him or the other veterans returning from all parts of the world. Neither were there any classes for the wives or families on understanding and helping their vet. All they had was their own eagerness to get back to their families and a fierce determination to restart the lives they had put on hold. That reality alone helped me better understand some of challenges these men and their families faced adjusting to their post military lives.
After I finished my work in DC and returned to California in 2013, I sensed that something new and significant would come as a result of my remarkable experiences in Washington, but I never expected it to be so personal and focused on one special veteran…my father. Since I had spent most of my career working on women’s education and employment issues, I truly expected to continue working in that arena but with a focus on the women veteran population.
But unexpectedly, I was pulled in another direction, and it continues to be rewarding journey. For one who had little interest in military history, I now have a growing library of books and resources about WWII especially the Pacific theater. Plus, I have visited several bases where my father was stationed and eventually plan to go to each. Also, I continually seek out and talk with veterans who served in the Pacific and visit museums and local military sites to further deepen my understanding on this era.
I know that if I had not worked on women veterans’ employment issues at the Department of Labor, I would not have realized how important it is to tell my family’s story. Without that framework, I would not have understood the sacrifices, the family dramas, and the personal challenges military families and veterans face. Also, I doubt if I would have appreciated the WWII patriotism, pride, and bravery those on the home front and those in the battle fields demonstrated. But most importantly, I doubt if I would have had the courage to tell this story.
My father’s letters have inspired me to be courageous just as they did “his Jenny,” my mother. He often encouraged her to “Be Brave,” and frequently acknowledged “what a brave girl” she was for all she was handling. Bravery was not in limited supply for the families impacted by the war and that bravery is still essential in today’s challenging world.
Thank you, Roland Edward Jett and Virginia (Jenny) Verle Vassey Jett for your bravery, your sacrifice, and for letting me share your World War II story, Letters, Love and Longing.