From Ch. 3, "Technologies of Proximity"
No more Dear Johns?
Pundits in the digital age often treat breaking-up as a humorous phenomenon. In the late 1990s, when the internet was entering puberty, various online services popped up offering to help dissatisfied partners split up for a modest fee. Politesubtlehints.com promised to send users' soon-to-be-exes anonymous notes and trial-size products, like bug repellent and Preparation H, by priority mail, while lifer.com touted a more direct approach, sending "evil Ex-greetings" to unwanted boyfriends and girlfriends. A decade later, gossip sites routinely divulged news that a certain celebrity had dumped another celebrity by text. But plenty of "ordinary" people also learned they'd been ditched by SMS. When comedians Eva McEhrue and Mel Owens invited their fans to submit read-aloud versions of final texts received from former partners, their YouTube video featuring these valedictory messages received more than 1.5 million views in a week. This viral phenomenon in 2015 prompted ABC Nightline presenter, Dan Harris, to pronounce the death of an obsolescent form: "in the old days people either broke up with you in person or with a handwritten note sometimes called a Dear John letter. Suffice it to say those days are over."
The jocularity of these break-up sites and memes stands in marked contrast to the somber tenor of much commentary on how the digital revolution has destabilized intimate relationships in military circles. Behavior that may seem comically cavalier in the civilian world-- a reality TV star's text telling her husband she wants a divorce-- reverberates with different force when the recipient is a soldier serving overseas.
In military psychology literature, online discussion boards and veterans' testimony, the dangerous velocity of electronic communication is a theme that recurrently surfaces in connection with Dear Johns sent by email, social media or text. Stationed in Balad, Iraq in 2007, Captain Glen Wurglitz, a psychologist with 785th Medical Group, told Stars and Stripes: "Back in the olden days, a 'Dear John' letter used to take three months to arrive. With instant messaging it's 'I'm selling the house.' Send." Wurglitz exaggerated. Even during World War II, letters rarely took three months to arrive. As for the simultaneous announcement of divorce and property sale by text, we can only guess whether many SMS messages took quite such a brutal form. But some stateside partners certainly did use instant messages to terminate relationships, with or without a real estate transaction appended. Airman Robin Ault recollects the electronic Dear John he received while serving in Iraq:
I actually -- when I first got over there, I had a girlfriend, and -- it was a new one on me -- I got blown off via text message, which was a new shootdown. I had never been -- you know, hey, can't see you anymore, and I'm like, wow, technology, isn't it wonderful?
Others relate that they, or those serving with them, had relationships ended via MySpace messages and Facebook chats while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. Some soldiers report having called home only to overhear, or intuit, the presence of another man with their wife or girlfriend.
Many commentators on digital breakups in the military tacitly endorse a ballistic theory of communication. They hypothesize that the faster "bad news" travels, the greater the damage it inflicts on impact with its target. Put differently, A Dear John delivered almost instantaneously by text, email or social media leaves a messier exit wound than a conventional letter. This proposition implies that mail, which may hitherto have taken days or even weeks to reach its destination, lost some of its force by dawdling along the way. Delayed communication stung less, lacking the sharp edge of immediacy.
Whether recipients of mailed Dear John letters would agree that greater velocity equates with deeper heartbreak is a moot point. Servicemen in World War II, Korea and Vietnam may well have felt that speed of delivery had little to do with the pain caused by a break-up note, even (or perhaps especially) if the fait accompli was days or weeks old by the time men discovered they'd been rejected. Personnel deployed overseas in those conflicts faced a now largely eliminated obstacle to sustaining intimate partnerships: tardy and inconsistent mail delivery.
For troops serving in the most insular and isolated theaters of World War II, not knowing what was going on at home-- why they'd heard nothing for weeks at a time-- could prove a nagging distraction from duty. Imagination readily filled the void left by silence with fretful, or more morbid, speculation. Military morale reports compiled in the South West Pacific bulged with complaints about the parlous condition of mail service. In January 1944, one disgruntled GI vented in a letter home: "You know the old s--t they dish out in the States, 'Keep up the Soldiers' Morale, Write regularly.' Well if they'd worry less about those posters and try to do a little more about getting our mail over here I might feel just a little bit better about 'doing my part'." Another enlisted man suggested to his girlfriend that "she might as well cast her letters off in a bottle and throw them into the river after a heavy rain." Their arrival could scarcely be any less speedy or certain than through the army postal service. Embittered soldiers often seethed over the agonizingly slow pace of mail delivery, while half-empty planes flew back and forth, and mailbags sat mouldering undelivered in New Guinea warehouses.
These comments have been preserved because morale officers kept a beady look-out for anything in GIs' letters that cast doubt on the "sanctity of the mail," supposedly an inviolate principle. But while it was forbidden for enlisted men to voice complaints about censorship in letters home, some officers violated their men's mail in more egregious ways. One enlisted man explained to his wife how hard it was to express loving sentiments in his letters when these heartfelt outpourings elicited the mockery of his college student officer. The latter had scornfully asked whether she believed everything in the letters. '"I really admire your wife if she does,' jibed the officer." The humiliated GI continued, "So darling if my letters don't sound so good it is because of the reasons above." Not uncommonly, enlisted men noted in letters home how they'd seen officers chuckling together in their mess hall as they censored mail, reading "choice bits aloud so they can all laugh." Some officers even took their subordinates to task for poor "sentence structure, grammar and continuity of thought," as though they weren't screening letters but grading papers. Officers who compiled morale reports were clearly troubled that some of their brethren plundered supposedly sacrosanct mail for purposes of humiliation. Yet historians can quote verbatim from aggrieved enlisted men's letters only because complaints about officers' violations were themselves censorable: a salutary reminder that archival researchers, no respecters of the "sanctity of the mail" either, are guilty of secondary acts of trespass.
Two or more decades later, sluggish mail delivery remained a dampener of morale during the earlier years of America's Vietnam war. Prior to 1966, surface mail could take as long as sixty to ninety days in transit-- an untenable situation MACV worked hard to address, reducing the transit time for airmail letters and packages to just three or four days in major base areas. Public Law 87-725 (authorized in November 1966) boosted efforts to expedite mail by authorizing the airlift of all letters and personal tape recordings between the continental US and Military Post Offices overseas at surface-rate postage. That a choked system had been unblocked was attested by a huge increase in postage stamp sales on US military bases in Vietnam, nearly doubling from 4,534,162 in 1966 to 8,360,176 the following year. Even if mail still took longer than a few days to reach remote bases, GIs didn't have to compose love letters with the inhibiting knowledge that an officer would later read their words, and perhaps ridicule them. Personal correspondence wasn't subject to censorship in Vietnam. During the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, officers have been empowered to monitor their subordinates' online activity and social media use, but have not scrutinized outgoing "snail mail" or listened in on phone-calls.
Rather than trying to determine whether today's soldiers are uniquely cursed by remaining digitally within the orbit of home while deployed overseas, it's perhaps more judicious to note that sustaining love in wartime is-- and always has been-- an immensely demanding proposition. Individuals experience these demands in highly personal ways. Technology that makes separation bearable to some can make it unendurable to others. There is, in short, no ideal distance between "here" and "there" that resolves intrinsic tensions between being at home and being at war; remaining in love and participating in conflict. Each generation of American soldiers has faced the challenge of how to be emotionally present in one location while remaining professionally focused in another. "A good soldier can't have a divided mind," warned Cpl. Roscoe A. Rogers in the Afro-American in 1943. Contemporary commentators often imagine the digital era presents more severe challenges of split consciousness than soldiers experienced hitherto. Slow-moving communications, they imply, facilitated compartmentalization and, with "home" sealed in its remote airtight box, uniformed personnel must have found deployment less stressful. But in the 1940s minds were commonly divided by anxious imaginings prompted by too little connection with home. And Dear Johns mailed across oceans sometimes felt just as wounding as texts pinged over the ether.
