The Late Arriving Letter

Memories of a Letter Carrier

During the Vietnam war years I was delivering mail in our town, and on a regular occurrence I saw many letters that went off to our boys from their families and saw many coming back to families that I served on my mail route. I could immediately recognize those letters by the red stripes on the border around the envelope.

Many of our men and boys went off to fight in that war in the jungles of that far away Asian country that many of us had never heard of. The letters that went both ways were so important to both soldiers and their families.
There were also those sad times that military officers would come to the doors of homes to report that a son or husband or father had died in the service of their country.

One of our young boys by the name of William who had been to college. He'd trained in ROTC and enlisted in the army in support of our country in the fight for freedom. He was commissioned to a lieutenant in the army and sent off to war.

The letters started to come in from him and go out from the families. After a time, his parents were notified that he had been killed in action in those jungles. His body was returned to his hometown and buried with honors.

A few days after the funeral, I was delivering the family's mail and I was shocked to see I was delivering a letter to his parents that he had written before he had lost his life. I couldn't imagine how that mother and father felt as they opened that envelope and read their son's last letter to them. Every time I would deliver to that house at 826 So. 13th Street I would think about that letter. Even to this day I can't pass that house without thinking about "The Late Arriving Letter."
Written by mail carrier Billy S. Crenshaw, my daddy.