My Uncle Winston’s War Letters

There were dozens of them, letters from my uncle to his mother written while he served in the Army in World War II. The handwriting was careful and perfect, the lines even and straight on unlined paper, penmanship so perfect it could instruct third graders across the country. He had learned well.

There were so many letters it was impossible to read them at one sitting, especially when time was short and decisions pressing. “Who’s going to take Uncle Winston’s letters?” I asked. My sister-in-law, who was busily packing up photo albums, answered that she and my brother would take them. My brother, being the oldest, was in charge of distributing my parents’ things. My uncle’s letters, originally sent to my grandmother, had been taken by my mother from her mother’s house when she died. Then they sat amidst the photos and diplomas, folded embroidered tea towels and the many rarely visited precious things in the bottom drawer of my mother’s dining room cabinet. They had been there thirty years and I had never seen them before.

I should stop what I’m doing and read the letters, I thought. I’m not going to have another chance. If I read them, it would put life into the words, “Your uncle served in Burma. It was very bad.” I wondered, knowing my uncle, what could have been so bad. Handsome, suave, the maker of magic tricks for children, the teller of jokes, he of the wavy hair and the beautifully pressed white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, that uncle seemed to have put the war way behind him. Or so I thought. My uncle died when I was a freshman in college. He had gone on to have a difficult life and his death was tragic. My grandmother was really never the same after that. Uncle Winston’s problems were never discussed, he was just admired, revered. I can still see the framed portrait of him in his uniform sitting on my grandmother’s mantle. She loved her son. Oh, did she love him.

“I hate that song,” she said to me once when I was about nine or ten and we heard Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” on the radio. Why, I wondered. Everybody likes Bing Crosby. “It just made all the boys over there in the war sad. Made them homesick. Never had any use for that song.” I see her now sitting at home in Michigan while her son was in Burma, thinking that maybe that he was hearing that song somehow somewhere, worried that it would make him feel bad. I’ve never forgotten how my grandmother worried about her son’s feelings when he was in the thick of war on the other side of the world. That is how a mother loves her son, no matter if it makes sense or not.

My uncle’s letters went with my brother and his wife to their home in Texas and eventually found their way to my uncle’s son who probably should have had them in the first place. I missed my chance to read the letters. Oh, I could go visit my cousin on the other side of the country and sit in his living room and read them but I know I won’t. The moment passed. I had them in my hand and let them go. I think about that, how often we miss an opportunity to read and listen and understand how it was while we’re rushing to put things in their proper place, keepsakes for their own sake. It’s a mistake to hurry so much that we miss people’s stories. If I learned nothing else from my uncle’s letters, I learned that.

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Republished on Memorial Day, May 27, 2024, in honor of my uncle, Winston Boyes.

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Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash