This message was self-deleted by its author

[cloudbase]

3. It can change things.

Back when I was a junior officer in the Merchant Marine, I was on a ship that was under charter to the Military Sealift Command. Because of that, we had FPO mail privileges. We made a cruise to Northern Europe, and received no mail.

The next trip was to the Far East. Unknown to me, my fiancee had written President Carter about the problems with non-delivery of the mail.

Halfway across the Pacific I'm sitting at breakfast and the chief mate asks me if my fiancee's name was XXXXX. I replied that it was indeed, and of course asked him why he would ask. He said we got a "burner" of a radiogram the night before, and it would be something I might want to have a look at.

We've got that message in a scrapbook today. A bit yellowed, but still readable.

Turns out that the radiogram was from the Chief of Naval Operations inquiring about our mail. Copied on the message were quite a few admirals, and one poor schmuck who was the MSC officer in Pusan, South Korea.

We got all the mail from the European deployment, and all the stuff they had for us going to the Pacific ports.

We'll be celebrating our 38th anniversary this July.

So, my advice is to write. If you don't, . . .

You know the rest.