“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.

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.

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.