March 20, 1967
Fort Bliss, Texas
“Well, I guess I'm in the Army now. I've got my uniform and haircut and the whole works.”
Love, Jim
Jim's Story
A wooden chest. Decades of letters. A story waiting to be found.
Rick was packing for a flight home to Seattle when his mother, Linda, showed him a rough, handmade wooden chest that had belonged to her late husband, Jim Cook.
Inside were dozens of handwritten letters addressed to Jim's parents. Rick picked up one of the envelopes. The fragile paper carried deep creases from the decades it had spent folded away. Across the letterhead Jim had written simply: Vietnam.
The postmark was from 1968. As Rick and Linda examined more of the correspondence, they noticed something else. Jim ended his letters the same way:
Love, Jim.
Jim had rarely spoken about what he experienced in Vietnam and had never mentioned the letters to Linda. The chest had remained tucked away in a dark corner of the basement.
Those letters became the heart of this collection.
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