“Dear John” letters have loomed large in American war-lore ever since GIs first coined the phrase in World War II. Receiving a break-up note from a wife, fiancée, or girlfriend has come to appear a rite of passage for men in uniform. The motif of female treachery and male tragedy circulates both in the stories servicemen and veterans tell one another and in US culture more broadly – in pop music, movies, and novels. Yet no prior author has devoted a book to the “Dear John” phenomenon. That virtually no bona fide specimens exist in archival collections helps explain this lacuna. But the fact that so many “Dear Johns” were physically destroyed soon after receipt doesn‘t make these letters impossible to study. Instead of regarding Dear Johns as a female-authored epistolary genre, we should conceive these letters as the product of a male vernacular tradition. Men have told us most of what we know about how and why women composed these letters, and the effects they‘ve had on recipients. This book explores the interplay between letter-writing and story-telling, inviting readers to contemplate why love is so hard to sustain in wartime.

Patriotic war culture has routinely touted the symbiosis between mail and morale. Disciplinarians of wartime feeling have issued reams of advice about how to “write right!” in order to sustain men’s esprit and keep love alive despite distance and danger. Above all, military and civilian opinion-leaders alike have strenuously and repeatedly warned women against dispatching Dear Johns to men serving overseas. These prompts have taken many forms: explicit guidance from newspaper and magazine columnists, marriage counselors, government bodies, and voluntary agencies (like the YMCA and Red Cross) as well as pointed cues about emotional etiquette supplied by popular music, radio and television shows, and Hollywood movies. This chapter probes the challenges of sustaining long-distance love at war – difficulties often minimized by wartime advice-givers, but unmistakable to men and women who have tried, and sometimes failed, to keep intimate relationships intact. It also considers how far prescriptions issued to “waiting women” have changed since the 1940s, proposing that there’s been considerable continuity, despite radical shifts in dating behavior and marital norms in US society.

This chapter explores how servicemen and veterans have conjured the Dear John through oral story-telling and life-writing. They have ascribed various motives to women who end relationships with men at war, and ventriloquized their voices. The paradigmatic Dear John is a note in which a girlfriend or wife announces not only the end of an old relationship but the beginning of a new one. Female disloyalty reverberates loudly through through this male vernacular tradition. But tragedy isn‘t the only register in which men recount heartbreak. Humorous yarns of recuperation from rejection, including inventive forms of payback, also abound. The sharing of Dear John anecdotes, jokes, and apocrypha has thus functioned as a vehicle for men‘s recovery and revenge. The chapter concludes, however, by giving women the last word. Even though some servicemen at war initiated breakups with their female partners, either conveying this news by letter or letting silence speak for itself, women have struggled to gain an audience for their stories of abandonment and betrayal. Wartime culture routinely held men and women to different standards of fidelity, as the Dear Jane‘s invisibility attests.

Fears surrounding Dear John letters have often encoded larger concerns – in civilian society and military communities – about new communications technologies that purport to bridge the gap between “over here” and “over there”: the home front and the war zone. From reel-to-reel tape recordings in Vietnam to cellular telephony, email, and social media in Iraq and Afghanistan, the double-edged character of technological innovation has fueled anxiety about the sustainability of love in wartime, and the lethality of Dear Johns in particular. Many observers of wartime’s emotional landscape have equated speed of delivery with a more devastating coup de grâce. As the digital age has brought service personnel and civilians into more continuous contact, “home” has come to appear (in the eyes of some military commentators) less a point of sentimental anchorage than a dangerous source of toxicity. But this chapter cautions against uncritical endorsement of a “ballistic” theory of communication that equates physical velocity with psychological impact. Servicemen in past wars found slow-moving mail – or protracted silence – just as hard to process as texts zapped in real-time across continents.

This chapter investigates how military psychiatrists have analyzed the “waiting wife.” In 1968, an Air Force psychiatrist lamented that colleagues, faced with many “modern Penelopes who are unsuccessful in adapting to their husbands‘ absence,” had neglected this “important clinical problem.” This soon changed. Clinicians probed the “syndromes” they diagnosed in servicemen‘s wives during the latter years of the Vietnam War. Wives of POWs came under particular scrutiny, with researchers developing algorithms to forecast which POWs‘ marriages would survive. Media interest in POW spouses peaked with “Operation Homecoming” in 1973. When several returned prisoners‘ marriages collapsed soon thereafter, “Penelope” was again found wanting. This chapter links national anxieties about POWs‘ wives to broader figurations of female disloyalty. Dr. Emanuel Tanay‘s hypothesis of a “Dear John Syndrome” in Vietnam had already proposed in 1969 that women were sending more, and more vicious, Dear Johns to American men in southeast Asia than in any prior war. Veterans would soon amplify the charge that treachery on the home front, spousal and federal, had been unprecedentedly pervasive and injurious.

In the eyes of many US military commanders, the martial and the marital were, and ought to remain, worlds apart. Whether and whom enlisted men should marry preoccupied the armed forces in the twentieth century. This chapter explores the fitful progression of the services‘ marital policies and the various aspirations that underpinned them. These motives have included avoiding the cost of providing for dependents; preventing “gold-diggers” from entrapping servicemen; safeguarding operational efficiency by minimizing domestic distractions, and, conversely, boosting recruitment by incentivizing marriage and promoting “family-friendliness.” The armed forces have often presented their interventions as insulating naive young servicemen from bad marital choices. Whether servicewomen could marry, on the other hand, was (in commanders‘ eyes) less bound up with negative judgments about their partners‘ motives and emotional staying-power than with issues of procreation and maternity. In the twenty-first century, while the armed forces now accept more non-traditional partnerships and families, they continue to intervene in couples‘ lives through programs aimed at building spousal resilience.

This chapter examines military attitudes toward “emotional injuries” resulting from the end of romantic relationships. Evaluations of why some men “cracked” evolved substantially from World War I to the present. Often, however, psychiatrists attributed servicemen’s maladies to deficient female love: whether that of mothers or romantic partners. In Vietnam, psychiatrists construed romantic rejection as a “narcissistic injury”: a blow to the ego that led men to decompensate in various ways. Alcoholism, going AWOL, self-harm, and violence directed toward others were all associated with Dear John letters. The chapter considers how the military medical and legal establishments adjudicated unlawful acts perpetrated by servicemen whose intimate relationships had recently been severed by letter. It focuses on two court-martial cases: a Korean War POW who briefly rejected repatriation to the United States in 1953, citing a Dear John as his motive for defection, and a Marine Corps private court-martialled in 1969 for killing four Vietnamese peasants. In the latter case, military lawyers deemed the defendant to have been temporarily insane after his fiancée sent him a Dear John.

Recently, military leaders have tackled twin crises: soaring rates of suicide and rising levels of divorce among service personnel and veterans. Suicide prevention programs run alongside interventions to buttress couples. Many researchers have posited a correlation between relationship failure and lethal self-harm, with some military commanders identifying Dear Johns as the commonest cause of suicide. This chapter excavates a long tradition of associating Dear John letters with servicemen’s deaths by suicide. But it also scrutinizes the hypothesis that failed relationships, particularly those ended by letter, are the primary cause of suicide. More complex understandings of both why relationships fail under wartime pressure and why some service personnel have taken their own lives, are required. The chapter argues that military studies tend to underestimate the challenges deployment poses to intimate partnerships. By treating the couple as a self-contained unit whose dysfunctions emerge from within, researchers have often emphasized the psychological damage spouses do to service personnel, minimizing the emotional havoc war wreaks on those in its orbit.

The conclusion returns to, and completes, the story of Anne Gudis and Sam Kramer, whose fitful epistolary courtship was explored in earlier chapters. It also suggests why the Dear John letter has proven to be such a durable emblem of female betrayal in wartime, despite profound changes in US society and in American war-waging over the past century. Soldiers‘ and veterans‘ stories of abandonment and betrayal by female romantic partners are more than simply outlets for hurt feelings or bruised egos. They also underscore the chasm that many servicemen have felt between civilian society and those in uniform. As such, Dear John story-telling has elevated veterans‘ perceptions that men who jeopardized their lives for their country have been misunderstood and maltreated – not just by the women they loved and lost, but by the nation writ large.