Dear Aunt Fannie,

This morning one of my men turned to me and pointed a hand, filled with cuts and scratches, at a plant with soft red flowers and said, "That is the first plant I have seen today which didn't have thorns on it." The plant was also representative of Vietnam. It is a country of thorns and cuts, of guns and marauding, of little hope and yet in the midst of it all, a beautiful thought, gesture, and even person can arise among it waving bravely at the death that pours down upon it. Some day this hill will be burned by napalm, and the red flower will crackle up and die among the thorns. Yet that flower will always live in the memory of a tired, wet Marine.

Love,
Sandy


-On 11 November 1966, less than three weeks after he wrote this letter to his great-aunt Mrs. Louis Adoue, Marine 2Lt. Marion Lee Kempner, from Galveston Texas, was killed by a mine explosion near Tien Phu. After he disarmed one mine, another was tripped by one of his men. Although wounded by shrapnel, Lt. Kempner ordered the corpsman to take care of the other wounded man first. He died aboard a medevac en route to the hospital. He was 24 years old.