Love Letters from Vietnam:
Description
Turning on the radio can be a very serendipitous experience sometimes, can't it? I was driving in the car today and clicked on to our local NPR station. An audio interview of Marines in Afghanistan (linked below Tim's letter in the right column) was being played on "All Things Considered". It's an excellent little piece and fits perfectly into the "Love Letters from Vlietnam" . I was stuck by the officer's comment stating that he tries to discourage couples from marrying before deployment. In 1969, I had met my husband-to-be only 6 months before he went into the Army. Of course, we were madly in love, and we wanted to be married before he left for Vietnam (ah, the romance of it all, you know.) I would have changed nothing about our decision, but still I wonder about our outcome of our lives if we had chosen otherwise.
Foreword
There are always superfluous reasons why people "fall in" or "out" of love. Actually, maybe the falling in or out part is always caused by reasons outside of actual love and are related to where, on life's timeline, we have landed or where fate itself has flung us. Perhaps we just finished high school and are afraid of taking on four years of college. Perhaps a parent is ill or has just passed away and we reach outward to ease the pain. Maybe we're at the 40 year notch on our time line; or as in the case of the young soldier, maybe you need to buy essays online or maybe we're marching off to frightening war a half a world away.
Surely we wouldn't change the "falling in" part, no matter what the subconscious reason. It's that magical time when we first realize that someone outside of our family loves everything about us - a time, in fact, that some have defined as heaven itself. But the question remains: Would we feel the same way about the person with whom we're falling in love outside of the critical life circumstance that is happening to us simultaneously?
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