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Letters from long-ago war reveal a young and tragic love
STORY AND PHOTOGRAPH by Theron Willis
HOMETOWN NEWS
Pam Whitehead looks through the letters that she hasn’t read in over 40 years that were sent to her from a special someone who fought in the Vietnam War.
Sometimes the opening of an old dusty envelope hidden away in a corner can have an effect similar to time travel.
When Pam Whitehead of Lyman recently went through a 41-year-old stack of letters she was transported back to a time long ago. To a time before she was a mother and a grandmother, back when she was a sixteen-year-old girl in Cowpens and a fragile and fateful love was budding between her and a soldier she hardly knew who was writing to her from the foxholes in Vietnam.
Whitehead, then with the maiden name Bolton, started correspondence with twenty-year-old Army Private First Class Paul Martinez while he was stationed at Fort Lewis in the state of Washington. Martinez was buddies with a guy named Ricky who was from Cowpens and dating Pam’s sister, Gerri at the time.
For the rest of the story, see this week’s issue of your local Hometown News; Woodruff News, Boiling Springs Sentry, Inman Times, Blacksburg Times, Middle Tyger Times, Chesnee Tribune, Spartanburg County News and Whitmire News.
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