It was 1942. A tall lanky Signalman 3C from Beaumont, TX received a bundle of letters from the Home Front while on convoy duty in the Caribbean. Before Pearl Harbor, the Signalman had been attending North Texas Teachers College, the first in his family to attend college- the first to graduate High School for that matter. His father was a Night Foreman at the "Magnolia" oil refinery, then the largest refinery in the world. It was hard work, but it was steady and had taken care of the family during the worst of the Great Depression. The sailor's mother was from Southern Louisiana and pure Cajun (she spoke English with a heavy French accent).

After Pearl Harbor, the sailor went along with his cousin Ronnie and tried to enlist in the Marine Corps, but at 6'1" and barely 130 lbs, the Corps wouldn't take him. Dejected, he returned home whereupon his father said, "If you want to get yourself killed, then do it in the Navy." His father had him eat a bundle of bananas before taking him to the Navy recruiting office. At the office, they discovered that the recruiter and the father had served on the same ship during WWI. The recruiter told the prospective enlistee's father, "Don't worry. Navy chow will put some weight on him." Later, on a train to San Diego (as he later confessed) the young man started to have "a bad feeling about all this." In a way, he was lucky. Cousin Ronnie won an all-expense-paid trip to a tropical Island paradise called Guadalcanal. (After the war, Ronnie continued to suffer from Malaria attacks).

In a letter to his aunt, who was the head of the secretarial pool for Gulf Oil in Houston, the sailor had teased her by writing: "If you don't have time to write me, just get one of those pretty girls that work for you to write for you." She took him up on it, but instead of one, she had 10 secretaries write him--which brings us to back the bundle of letters. He would answer only one of the 10 women.

Parts 2, 3, 4, Epilogue