The Link, Vol 5 July, 1947 Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Link, Vol. 5: July, 1947

Just before noon mess, Captain Carlson sent me over to the Divisional Post Office on Goeben Platz. In our bunch of mail were three letters for me and I slipped them into an inside pocket, as I generally do with letters from home and especially from Dorothy. Funny! Sometimes I've carried one around all day, feeling of it now and then, just to make sure it's still there - the way a kid saves up a lollipop.

It was a busy day and we had to come back in the evening to finish up. It must have been nine o'clock when I got to my billet, lighted my candle - Candles in this Atomic Age! - and sat down to read. No need to tell you about mother and Dorothy's letters, though they of course came first with me. This story starts with the third letter, and before I opened it, I stared at it, wondering who in the world could be writing me from Florida. It went this way: My Dear Eaton: (Well, that was my name all right.)

You will be surprised to get a letter from me (I was) and you may not recall who I am. (I didn't.) But once we knew each other pretty well, in days when you called me "Tocktool," which was as near as you could get to Stockwell. (I began to remember.) To you those days will probably seem very far away. To your father and me they are less remote and, for the past week, while fishing for sea bass, we have been recalling them.

Hard to think of you as grown up and a member of our Army of Occupation, but your father tells me that is exactly what you are and that you hold the rank once held by Hitler - you are a corporal.

Talk of old days has reminded me of my own small part in World War I, when (being over draft age) I joined the Y and, for a time after the armistice, ran a soldiers' hotel in Coblenz. There I came to know a German pastor named Bruening, and seven years later when back in Germany, I spent a couple of days with his family.

He was one of the finest-spirited men I ever knew. (By this time you have probably learned for yourself that no land has a monopoly on good people.)

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