While undergoing amphibious invasion training on Cape Cod in 1943, a lonely G.I. meets a pretty young woman who is vacationing with her friends. The attraction is instantaneous. His Coney Island background and his corny jokes make him different from the boys she knows in staid Boston. When they part ways after their brief encounter, he promises to write, but she wonders if he'll even remember her address.The G.I. does remember her address and he does write, tentatively at first. She writes back, encouraging him. They meet once more, for a memorable Valentine's Day weekend in New York City just before he is sent overseas. Then, over the next several months, their correspondence becomes an almost daily ritual that lasts to the end of the war and which sustains the G.I. through combat duty in New Guinea and the Philippines and the occupation of Japan.Their letters take weeks to reach each other. In between, she suffers crushing loneliness and uncertainty over whether her young man will ever return. He is half a world away from everyone and everything he holds dear, tenaciously holding onto a thread of home through his growing affection for his darling, dear Ruthy.(The photographs in this edition are black & white.)