Love is Always Write Anthology Bonus Volume

beaches. And those Marines get younger every day. Or maybe I'm just getting older. We're winning, island by island, but the cost is so high. I was out in the boats trying to get the wounded out of the water. Grabbed a kid's arm and it came off in my hands. He was dead anyway.
    Keep writing. I need to know there's a sane world somewhere not filled with blood and death. At night I dream of gentle slow rain washing all the blood away. It helps some. D
    May 9, 1945
    We just got the word of victory in Europe. The whole ship broke out cheering and there was an orgy of hugging. Pity there were no girls around to make it a real orgy. At least it bucked us up. The Japs may be a different breed, and it won't be easy, but with the US of A turning all her attention to us here in the Pacific we will get it done. Did you kiss anyone when you heard the news? I just imagined my girl back home, thought about kissing the hell out of her mouth and other unmentionable parts. I hope you celebrated and had similar thoughts, even if you don't have a girl right now. It was sunny all day as if the weather was celebrating with us. Too hot though, and no rain, more's the pity. But sun can be good too. Now it's time for us and the poor damned Marines to dig down deep and line up the next beach to be won. God help us all, because the Japs won't. D
    June 16, 1945
    There was a man in town today when we got liberty. We came across him in a bar, drinking like a fish. He reminded me of someone I used to know. Anyway, I asked him why he was trying to drink himself under the table and he just started talking. He's a doctor. He'd been working in a Jap internment camp that was liberated. He started talking about it and he couldn't stop. Words just came pouring out of him like shit from a sewer. I don't understand how human beings can do that to each other. First the Krauts and now the Japs, treating people worse than animals. After a bit I helped him get drunk enough to pass out and several of us carried him back to his hotel. I wish I could go back in time and know enough not to ask him that question. We are doing the right thing in this war. They have to be stopped. But there is no end to the pain. Sorry to be such a sad sack, but some days it's hard to see the end of this. I do know it will come, though, so don't worry. I'll be home before the snow flies. Of course it never snows in California, so that's pretty safe. D
    Sept 8, 1945
    Jacob, I had a letter I was going to send you, about how they announced the surrender and we all just about came apart. But I ripped it up. Met a guy yesterday who had pictures from Nagasaki. Holy Christ. He was showing them around, bragging about American fire power and how the Japs got what they deserved. But dear God, those pictures! All I could think about was the destruction. The deaths. That was a city full of civilians, women and kids and little old grandfathers. And not a tree left standing. Those pictures burned the hate right out of me. All I want now is to go home. D
    Jacob stowed the letters carefully back in the shoebox and laid the snap of himself and Daniel over them tenderly. The corners of the snapshot were softened from handling, but Daniel still smiled out of it, eyes narrowed at the sunlight, looking like a movie star, with his shirt securely in Jacob's grip. God, Jacob wished he could still feel what that was like, to have Daniel beside him. He wasn't forgetting the man, but sometimes when he closed his eyes he could no longer bring Daniel's voice or his touch back clearly. It had been too damned long.
    It must have felt even longer to Daniel out there in the Pacific. The first few letters came with little pictures all over them, sketches of the guys sleeping, of the cook stirring a big pot with a cigarette in his mouth, the long column of ash threatening to fall into the soup. There was a sketchy cartoon of a sailor tripping over a rope, a drawing of a gull perched on the railing that was so real Jacob thought he could almost feel the bird's feathers. Gradually the pictures had petered out. The last few letters were just bleak words on paper. That scared him more than the contents. A world where Daniel wasn't drawing anything must be pretty close to hell.
    It had been over two months since that last letter. Not the longest gap he'd ever lived through, but the war was supposed to be over now. Surely the mail should be improving. He would try to write again. Something lighthearted and fun. Nothing