I Love You Lover!

BLACK & WHITE INTERIOR EDITION

This is the true story of the life I lived as a young Marine wife in the early 1960s—full of funny moments, scary ones, heartbreaking ones, and some that still feel like they came straight out of an “I Love Lucy” episode.

I grew up doing all sorts of crazy things in grade school, junior high, and high school, and by the time I married my husband, Phil, I thought I knew what adventure was. I hadn’t seen anything yet.

Just three months after our wedding, the Marine Corps sent Phil to Okinawa. After being apart during his four months of boot camp, the thought of being separated again for thirteen months was unbearable. The Marines didn’t allow wives to join their husbands overseas—and unlike other branches, they didn’t pay for us to go, either. But I was an American citizen with a passport, and I knew one thing for sure: I was not letting the Marine Corps keep me away from my husband.

So I went. Alone. At twenty-one years old. I lived among the Okinawan people, struggled to find work when no one wanted to hire an American woman, and eventually found a job thanks to my friend Sgt. Giles. When Phil was sent overseas a second time—this time with the shadow of Vietnam hanging over us—I followed him again. This book is my story of those years: 1962–63 and 1965–66. It’s about the challenges, the culture shock, the dangers, the homesickness, the faith that carried me, and all the unexpected joys that came from choosing love over fear.

Woven through these memories are 488 letters Phil wrote to me—from boot camp, the Philippines, and his time in Vietnam, where 381 of his letters came from. A total of 1,732 pages of love, worry, hope, and devotion. In one letter dated November 24, 1965, he wrote to me:

“I hope, Lover, that someday you will write a book about what you have went thru to be with me… If anything ever did happen to me I want you to write a book about us.”

This book is the promise I kept to him. It’s a glimpse into what it was really like to be a Marine wife in a foreign country during wartime—young, in love, stubborn, determined, and learning to trust that God would carry us through every unknown.