Troopathon 2009: Letters Like Clockwork

Not long after our present wars began in Afghanistan and Iraq the letters started to arrive.  One a month, two, sometimes more… We received one just last week. They come from most every military organization you can imagine. Some are about care packages, others are about air conditioners, and a few have to do with adopting a soldier to share correspondence with. None ask for money. They’re thank you notes, thanking “Mr. and Mrs. John Nolte for your generosity.”

Only through these letters do I ever learn of my generosity. This is my wife’s doing.

Since the arrival of the first letter we’ve had some lean years and some flush, but still they come. Only the amount we’re being thanked for ever changes. Frequently, during those leanest of times, my wife would get angry because what she could afford to donate barely covered the costs involved in the sending of the thank you.  So she’d scrape up another donation and send it along with an attached note politely advising: “To Whom It May Concern: No reply is necessary. Please use the money for the troops.”

Sometimes these organizations send their thanks in the form of special certificates, return-address labels, pens, calendars, lapel pins… She keeps them all. They’re somewhere.

She never mentions her donations, not to me or to anyone else. Were it not for the letters I wouldn’t even know of them. Of course I wouldn’t object, but to her this isn’t something you discuss. American men and women are at war. You send what you can when you can.

My wife lost a brother in Vietnam. She was a teenager at the time and they were close. Like her donations, this is something else she doesn’t speak of.  

My better half.