Letter to Tad, July 1945

Dearest Tad:

I take your letter out and re-read it so often it's beginning to fray at the edges and tear in the creases. The world's full of change, and I feel you are one of the last remaining certainties.

If this war's proven nothing else, it's shown me that I can get used to almost anything. The daily rhythm of factory life, the rivets and bucking bars and lunches and breaks have become almost a comfort while the world beyond Seattle falls to pieces.

But now even that's changing. It's as though once the world (or at least part of it) begins to heal a bit things here start to dissolve.

Susan has quit the factory, and it's only a matter of time before the rest of us go. The pictures in Life Magazine of a lonely, empty Willow Run, only recently flowing with rivers of B-24s, were a sharp reminder that the world moves on.

Even though the fighting in the Pacific continues I'm sure my friends and I won't be needed at Boeing much longer. General Arnold wants to pulverize Japan, but a country the size of California will soon be as saturated with craters as the Moon, and there will be no need for as many Superfortresses as we're now churning out.

So I'm trying to take my mind away from the rivets and turn it to the future. Thinking of you makes me happy and hopeful. My vision of our life together isn't yet complete, but it grows daily in my mind and my heart.

Please write again soon before your last letter completely disintegrates.


Love,


Rosie

Letter from Tad, June 1945

Dearest Rosie:

You've every right to toss this letter unopened into the scrap pile given how long it's taken to make its way from my heart and mind to your mailbox. Night after night, on mahogany desks in Washington, D.C. and steel tables in drafty prefabricated huts in the Hanford desert, I've scratched out the words on a sheet of gradually fraying paper. Sometimes just a sentence, or nothing at all, before the phone rings or someone knocks. It's always urgent and always secret. But never as important to me as you are.

Alas, the world doesn't see it that way. Of course you know I can't tell you much about my work, but I can say I've been traveling a great deal. Washington State, Washington, DC, and even New Mexico. You'd like it there - clean, beautiful desert with sharp mountains against a dark blue sky. I hope we'll see it together some day.

Wherever I go I read the same sickening stories you do in each day's newspaper.

Okinawa shows us that there is no hope of redemption for the Japanese. They will never stop fighting until every last one of them is dead, and they'll make sure to take as many of us with them as they can. This war cannot continue, for their sake as well as ours.

The project I'm working on, if it's successful, will put an end to this and every other war. I know everyone in Seattle's guessing: Could it be a new kind of radar? A secret code? I will say this - when it's revealed it will change the world, and for the better. After all the unimaginable pain and destruction this war has caused, we'll come out clean and bright as a sunrise over the New Mexico desert.

I slipped out of my hut this afternoon, determined to finish this letter. It's dusk now and I can barely see to write, but it's beautiful here. I'm sitting on a boulder still warm from the day's heat. Below me, the lights of the Hanford Works are just beginning to twinkle across the sagebrush. Above me, the deep violet band of the Earth's shadow is climbing above the eastern horizon, pulling a blanket of stars behind it.

They don't teach physicists poetry, so my silly words don't do justice to my feelings. But I'll say I take enormous comfort in knowing the same stars are shining on you, even though they're hidden by Seattle's clouds. No matter how much work clamors for my attention there's always a hidden corner of my heart that's untouched by it. It's a place like this lonely ridge: Safe from the world's cares, needing only you by my side. I imagine us standing here together arm in arm, gray-haired and wrinkled, looking over the ruin that peace will have made of this place, and I smile.

All my love,

Tad

Letter to Tad, May 1945

Dear Tad

I apologize for taking so long to write.

Since the war came I haven't started a letter with anything but "Dear Bob." Each time I've scraped a chair up to the desk to try, my pen seemed to trace the lines that were etched ever deeper into the blotter over the last four years.

But time runs only forward. The magazines promise a fresh, shining world after victory, gleaming like new cars and kitchens. I'm sure it's true, though I haven't been able to make myself care until now. You've helped me to see that life will go on, that there are good, kind people with loving hearts no matter what is happening in the world.

I miss you and wish your work wasn't on the far side of the state. I know you can't talk about Hanford and of course I'd never ask you to. You'd probably get a good laugh, or at least one of your quiet chuckles, over the things people speculate about it: Some kind of improved radar. A big bomb like the ones they dropped on bunkers in Occupied Europe. Or my favorite story, a Buck Rogers death ray.

Whatever it is you're really doing no doubt it's for a speedy end to the war and the betterment of mankind.

Life here on Tillicum Drive is outwardly the same, but changes are seeping in. My neighbor Susan's husband is one of the lucky few coming home to a white-picket life instead of transferring to the Pacific. My other neighbor Betty still dreams of personally roasting every Japanese alive in revenge for Joe's death on Attu, but she's distracted now by a mysterious new man in the factory. And of course you know about your sister Jane. By the way, she hasn't said much about newlywed life recently; I do hope all is well.

So that leaves me. And I don't want to be left. I want a world of peace and a man to share it with. I am grateful to you for your patience.

Since you can't write about your work, tell me about your dreams. You've seen so much more of the world than I have, being a college professor and living on the East Coast and hobnobbing with the grandees in Washington, DC. How do you think we'll live once victory is won? Helicopters in every garage like the papers promise? I'd settle for a new washing machine but perhaps I'm thinking too small.

I hope you will respond more quickly than I wrote to you. I can't tell you how much it means to me to look forward to something.

Very truly yours,

Rosie

Valentines Day

Of course Valentines Day is nothing.

No holiday matters when girls like me come home each night to empty bungalows with the murder of millions tossed onto their doorsteps.

How morbid. I look at what I've just written and realize I'm feeling sorry for myself even when I'm trying to pretend I'm not. I'd better snap out of it before break's over or I'll catch heck from the foreman.

So I might as well be honest. After all, it's not as though anyone but me is ever going to read this.

It's my fourth Valentines Day alone. How many more will there be? Should there be? I love Bob desperately and always will. But the Army says he's never coming back and I can't possibly know what General MacArthur and all his Lieutenant Generals and sub-generals and whatever else they're called don't. My heart thinks it does, but my head knows better.

Tad is a good man, who says he loves me. Whatever that mysterious war work he's in charge of across the mountains in Hanford is, he takes it seriously.

If I spurn him, what am I to do? The war's ending. Oh, sure, the posters tells us to "Keep at it, this war's not won by a darned sight," but everyone can tell. My cousin Nick at home in Portland wrote that old man Henry Kaiser's already planning to scale back employment at the shipyards. "Back to the auto shop," he said, "assuming there will be cars after the war."

I remember hearing Prime Minister Churchill say on the radio two years ago that it was "the end of the beginning." Now, it's the beginning of the end. And it's up to me to decide what happens next.

Drat, there's the whistle. Back to the bombers.

A Year and a Day

It's been three hours now since I opened the envelope.

Strangely, I don't feel as though I should die.

I don't feel anything at all.

The letter was short. Army efficient.

"Dear Mrs. Sinclair. I regret to inform you that your husband, Lieutenant Robert Sinclair, has been declared killed in action.

Having been missing since December 30, 1943, and no evidence of his survival having been found, it is my sad duty to bring you the news that Lieut. Sinclair died serving his country.

Rest assured in your hour of grief that your husband's sacrifice was not in vain. The cause of justice and freedom will prevail, and millions will be liberated from tyranny by the gallantry and selflessness of Lieut. Sinclair and the thousands of others who lie in eternal piece in the soft earth of France or the coral sands of the Pacific."


Bob would have been twenty-five years old in three weeks.


I should sleep.

July 1944

Dear Bob:

War has made us many things: Fighters, factory workers and experts at going through the day while disaster hides in the next ridge, the next island, or the postman's next bag of letters.

Now I'll have to add another item to that list: Assassins.

There's a strange new fellow at the factory. His name is Jim and he doesn't talk much. And when he does it's always abrupt, as though all the extraneous chatter that fattens ordinary conversation has been burned away from his thoughts.

Jim says he met you in New Guinea. That you were part of a secret mission to ambush Admiral Yamamoto. That your handpicked squadron of Lightnings flew for hours at wavetop height to arrive at the exact place and moment Jim's coastwatchers said the enemy's plane would appear. That the architect of Pearl Harbor was blown out of the sky and smashed to the jungle floor still strapped to his seat.

The papers have recently had news of that year-old event, but I never guessed you had a hand in it. I imagine we'll never talk about it, but I'll always know in a warm corner of my heart.

What a strange thought: I'm thrilled to learn my husband stalked a man across the vast Pacific and killed him.

Well, since secrets are coming out, I'll tell you mine: I murdered someone, too. Not exactly premeditated, and everyone at the plant says it was an accident. But the man's just as dead as Yamamoto. He was awful fellow who made it his business in life to torment me. I finally snapped back at him when were were both on a Fortress wing. He came at me. I raised my rivet gun, his foot caught in the air hose, and over the edge he went in the wink of an eye. He left the factory feet first, and I was horrified. But inside the horror was a tiny bright speck of gladness.

I pray this war won't go on much longer for fear of what we all might become.

I'm going to go burn this diary page now. I'll watch the ashes flare golden for an instant and wink out as they spiral up the chimney, carrying away our secrets away to the garden. Next year they'll be nothing but bright flowers.

Hurry Up and Wait

May, 1944

Dearest Bob:

It seems the world is holding its breath like an angry toddler. But General Eisenhower's a patient parent, impervious as to whether humanity turns blue.

Everything's slowed to a crawl, and the talk's of little else but invasion. Strange how time passes slower and slower the more you want something. But glacial as it must be for everyone else, I'm a boulder in a speeding rapid while I wait for your return.

A fellow I once met (never mind who he is, he's not important) said I reminded him of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus. You remember, from the Trojan War. I had to climb on a chair and get my old college books off the high shelf to remind myself of the rest of the story.

It seems Penelope waited twenty years for Odysseus' return. She was thronged by a hundred suitors, each urging her to give her husband up for dead. But she wouldn't. Being only a woman she hadn't the brawn to fend off the would-be bridegrooms so she used her brains instead. She told her ardent admirers she'd marry when she finished weaving her father-in-law's burial shroud. Every day she wove, and every night she'd secretly undo most of the weaving. Being thickheaded lunks, the suitors never caught on to the trick until it was too late: Odysseus returned and shot all of them dead with arrows.

I hardly have a hundred suitors, but there have been a couple of pests lurking about. Don't you worry, I'll send them all packing, so there won't be any need for arrows when you return. I just need to figure out what to do. Taking my day's bomber-building apart each night isn't realistic, but if Penelope could hold off a hundred men I can take care of a wolf or two.

I just hope it's less than twenty years before you return.


Your loving wife

Rosie