The Letter

The Letter

The junior letter sorter held an envelope up in the air and waved it around to attract the senior letter sorter’s attention.

“It’s one of them,” he said, a bit anxiously. “I read about letters with years written in the address bars.”

The senior clerk plucked the letter from her subordinate’s pincer grip and looked at the writing on its back. SEND THIS TO July 4th 2025! “These are collectibles. Some guy buys them up for research or something. Big money.” He tapped the thin rectangular envelope with his free hand. “I will put this baby, in a special file for the boss.”

“What does it mean?” asked the junior clerk. “That date is almost four years ago.”

“It means a bonus for us,” laughed the older man.

*****

The famous desert city wasn’t recognizable after almost two years of twice weekly bombings. Despite all the death and destruction, the rebel forces still fought back with road mines, mortars and bombings.Sometimes suicide bombers, sometimes children. It seems so pointless. How can those politicians decide when a war is needed? They don’t fight it. I never should have signed up.

I hate it here, and I can’t even remember why I did enlist. The longer it goes on, the more questions I have. Why are we attacking these poor people? Why do our leaders send so many of us here to either die, or be physically and/or mentally scarred for life? I know that I’ll never be the same.

An enemy sniper got my best friend. Head shot. I saw it happen.

I killed two men. They were shooting at us, but they are dead because of me. What am I becoming?

My sergeant had his foot blown off by an improvised explosive device and I had to tourniquet his leg.

No wonder I started smoking hashish. Daily. Without it, I can’t sleep.

The first year hadn’t been too bad. Training as I was in the medical assistant trade, I was not exposed to the fighting, though I did see some horrific injuries. Second year, I was a corporal, and my unit got moved to the front lines. Six months in, my luck ran out. Under a white flag held high above the windshield of our jeep, me and private Francine Le Drew were bringing candy to the enemy kids who still inhabited the city outskirts. It was a weekly tradition that started almost a year before. Both sides let it happen, until some zealot with a M72 light anti-tank weapon, better known a Super Bazooka, decided to end it. He hit us just under the front of our hood and we went sky high, all our candy spilling out of the shattered windows to the hard baked earth beneath us.

Francine died in the vehicle. Me, I got ejected somehow before it hit back down and blew. My ears were bleeding and I couldn’t feel my legs and then ... I woke up in a helicopter.

Our guys watched the whole thing from about half a kilometer away. I don’t know many enemy men, women or children that they killed in retribution, or how many of ours died, but that stupid fucker with the Super Bazooka started some big-time carnage. Poor Francine. Poor villagers. Poor me.

The base hospital that I was taken to was about ten kilometers from the fighting. The doc there, a colonel, told me that I was gonna die and offered me some morphine. Bad internal injuries, he said, that needed expertise only available back home. I laughed at the irony.

Then, surprisingly, he smiled and told me to write a letter to my 18-year-old younger self and to write the day, month and year that that I enlisted on the address label. He promised that it would be delivered. “Warn yourself,” he instructed, and he passed me a pen and some paper and some morphine tablets.

As the first tablets took the edge off some of my pain, I picked up the pen, amused his suggestion, and started to write.

Dear me,

There will be a war in two years. No matter what is happening do not join up. It’s an oil grab and it’s not fucking worth it. Stay in school or get a trade, but stay home and stay alive.

It took me almost ten minutes of struggling to write those few lines. My scrawl was starting to become illegible and my mind was getting tired by then, so I signed the note with my initials and passed it to the colonel who gently folded it into the envelope. I watched him fill in the address label, writing my name, sans my rank, and the address where my eighteen year old self had been living when I enrolled. Then in bold letters he added:

SEND THIS TO July 4th 2025. PLEASE!

I watched him place the completed letter on top of the out going mail pile, and then let the morphine take me wandering. The pain was increasing and I was finding it hard to breathe. The doc sat in a chair beside my bed, took my hand and talked to me. “When this war started,” he said, “my boot camp sergeant, a grizzled veteran of a few campaigns, told me about a special letter delivery service. He swore by it, so I checked into it. It’s real. You don’t have to be here. You don’t have to die.

GOD, I wanted to believe him.

School had not been my favorite place. I did okay, but I liked action. Sports, camping, hunting, cars, girls. My dad died when I was twelve in a plane crash. My mom raised me and my younger sister by herself after that on a grade school teachers’ salary. She kept us fed and clothed, but there was not much left over for extras. When I finished high school, money was even scarcer as Mom had medical bills to pay after a breast cancer scare.

So, joining the military made sense. It meant a decent pay for me and a free education. Win-win, right? At the time it was a nerve-wracking decision to enlist or not. While there were no active conflicts involving our country’s troops, there were threats of war in the news, and none of my friends wanted to serve. The group I hung with was pretty anti-military during the 2020’s, but their families had money, and money opened the way to other roads and choices.

My mind was becoming increasingly confused as I lay there only half awake. Images of my mother and sister and a girl I liked got intermingled with bombs exploding, machine guns firing, grenades going off and the screams of my buddies dying. The darkness of sleep finally claimed me.

*****

I startled awake, still alive and not in any pain. I jumped out of bed and ran into the bathroom. No beard, no scars. It was just a dream. I wasn’t dying. I sat on the floor with my back against the bathroom door and tried to calm my racing heart. It had seemed so real.

Today was my meeting with the recruiters and I still wasn’t absolutely sure about joining. The bonus they were offering was very tempting, but it meant traveling overseas and maybe facing combat. Details from that dream were fading. Was it a warning or was it an overactive imagination from the big tub of ice cream I ate before bed.

I washed my face and got dressed like I was still going, putting on long denims and a striped short sleeved shirt that I liked. Then I joined my family at the table in our smallish kitchen. Mom served me and my little sister some pancakes and bacon for breakfast along with tall glasses of fresh squeezed orange juice. Usually we had cereal, but during summer vacation, mornings were less rushed and mom got more creative.

While me and little sis devoured our breakfast treat, Mom sipped on her coffee and sorted through the morning mail. She handed me an envelope. “Who’d be writing you?” she asked. I shook my head in ignorance and looked at the address label. I did not recognize the hand writing.

“And what does this mean?” she asked pointing to the last line in the address bar. SEND THIS TO July 4th 2025! “That’s todays date.”

I ripped it open.