Boulder, Colo

Sept. 27, 1944

Dear Jackie

Well, how goes it by now? I’m sure all night, but I thought I would inquire. Some of these sergeants are chosen because of special abilities to harass and torment, you know, but usually they are well-meaning souls. Usually, I say.

You see, I have been reading your letters to Mrs. Carlson, who by the way, is down tonight with a sick headache. But we think she is all right. Peggy is going over to see. Don’t let this alarm you. She is all right. I think she has just worked herself into a state because of Dudley’s death. She certainly was marvelous to us.

I was pretty sure that this war would cost us our oldest boy when it started in Europe away back in 1939. It was just a matter of figuring out arithmetically. When he chose the branch of service he did, it was all the more certain. I went through a small measure of this when he was here on leave, and even months before when he knew he would be successful in completing his training. Not very well worded, but I think you will know what I mean.

War is a cruel, coercive thing. It destroys human values as well as industrial plants, etc. It does things to us no matter whether we are in uniform or not. The young women who want to join up (I neither blame nor praise them) won’t escape it. You, now that you are in the service, will see a little of it, I dare say. But you are stronger or you wouldn’t be where you are, and there is a source of strength in the knowledge that you are right. Just don’t get confused and bewildered. I am sure you will be all the stronger because of your service. But you needn’t expect to make sense of all that is happening in and to the world. Just rely on old ideas. They are still good.

I’m a little soft, Jackie. Else I wouldn’t be writing to you in this fashion. But when Mary Morgan, then you, began talking of enlisting, these are the things I wanted to say, but could not then.

Greed is the fundamental cause of it all. Greed killed a boy without a vicious impulse in him, for us. Greed will kill many more. I am bitter. This business of being proud of a casket with a flag on it is not the kind of thing I go for. Dudley didn’t hate—anything but his bombardiering. He knew what his bombs would do, and he did not like it. He liked his navigation, though. He was willing to talk at length about it—but never about his bombardiering. He didn’t hate even the Japs. But he had the courage to carry on—even to grin. We are glad that he never had to kill anyone.

I don’t know whether Mrs. Carlson has told you any details or not. Dudley was one of five men killed when his plane refused to take off at Scott Field, near (practically in) St. Louis, at 8:17 a.m. Sept 18. One man, in the tail of the plane, came out alive, but badly hurt. They had flown from Lake Charles, La., the day before, and had spent the night there. The army says “apparently mechanical failure.” So be it. He was crushed. The plane, I think, weighs about 17 tons, and has to get well above 100 miles per hour to take off. It was the B-26 Marauder. His choice, (because he could navigate.) He had told us that when he was navigating, he was so busy on takeoffs that he scarcely knew when the plane left the ground. He was buried in Boulder- Green Mtn Cemetery- late in the afternoon of Sept. 21. He was presentable in his casket, but scarcely the boy we saw leave only a few weeks earlier. He was in the next to the last week of his combat crew training.

We are all right. Don’t give it a thought. Go on about your business. You’ve got a job ahead of you. Accept a little of the courage these fellows leave us when they die, and carry on, soldier.

I am including a picture of him. If this bothers you, Jackie, throw it away. You didn’t know him, and after all, he is only one of many. But he was the one for me. I am proud of his fine sensitive courage, not his death. That’s damnable. But, how I hate the thing that killed him. Dud, wouldn’t like me to write like this about him. (I’m out of paper and am not at the cabin!) Write about yourself.

Yours,

Zell F. Mabee