DEAREST MAMA

Walker collects the letters his uncle sent home from Europe while serving in World War II.

In 1924, Fletcher “Bud” Blanton was born in Horry County, South Carolina, and grew up accustomed to back-breaking work on a tobacco farm. In 1944, he was drafted into the United States Army as war engulfed Europe. He became a member of Company D, 413th Infantry, which was part of the 104th Infantry Division, informally known as the Timberwolves. He would serve on the battlefields of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. During the Battle of the Bulge, a little over two months into his deployment, he was killed; apparently, he was hit by a mortar shell while on guard duty. In 2022, the author, Bud’s nephew, stumbled upon a packet of letters Blanton sent home (including photographs) with a note from Walker’s long-dead father imploring him not to discard the contents. The author dutifully complied and found a wealth of information that brought clarity to his uncle’s short and somewhat inscrutable life. The discovery was one of great historical and emotional value, a point movingly observed by Walker: “Now, in my seventh decade, with far fewer years ahead than behind me, my uncle’s letters provided the most poignant reminder of service to country I had ever known, the letters from the one soldier whose wartime experience is an inseparable part of my own heritage.”

The author, who served as a reporter and editor for Stars and Stripes for more than 30 years, uses the letters as a springboard to craft a more comprehensive historical account, which includes the experiences of Bud’s family both before and after his death. He also furnishes brief biographical vignettes of several of the men who also served in the Timberwolves, astutely sketching a portrait of the common soldier. The letters themselves are the highlight of the book; Bud was a naturally “jolly” person, and a touch wild, too, but his experience of war, as short as his time overseas was, matured him profoundly. One letter he dispatched after being sent to the front makes this point affectingly: “I am about to realize what the war is all about,” he writes; “I often think about how lucky some of the people back home are an about how foolish I used to do when I was back home.” Walker captures not only Bud’s deepening character, but also his terrible loneliness away from home—he often pleaded with his seven brothers and sisters to write to him, and he would send as many as three letters a day to his girlfriend, Dot Floyd, back in the United States. The author’s speculations regarding what Bud’s life might have been like had he survived are heartbreaking—all of his options were waylaid by “those unpredictable characters called love and luck and fate.” This is a touching homage to a soldier who made the ultimate sacrifice for his country.

A tender, loving account of a short but honorable life.