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It’s August 29, 1941, embarkation day for the SS Santa Elena, a Grace Line steamship bound for Valparaiso, Chile. At Pier 57, New York Harbor, twenty-two-year-old Robin Bedford settles into cabin 128. Meanwhile Buster, her husband of ten weeks, hovers with the U.S. Army 101st Cavalry Regiment near the crisp and piney Massachusetts/New Hampshire border. That’s where 15,000 troops of the Blue Army face off with 25,000 men in the Red Army in the New England Maneuvers. So begins the continuing story of Robin, Buster, and a handful of other mid-twentieth century twenty-somethings, embarking on their newly-wed lives together under the shadow of WWII.
Three weeks later, in an open Scout car, Buster rolls south in a khaki-colored convoy through Gettysburg, Antietam, and along the Skyline Drive to Fort Bragg. In the Carolina Maneuvers, Lieutenant General Hugh A. Drum, Commanding General of the 400,000 soldiers of the “First Army,” sees to it the military might of the new U.S. Army strategically grows bigger and stronger in an all-out sham war over sixteen counties in North and South Carolina.
PFC Buster insists his military service “must of necessity be directed to the improvement of the armed forces of this country, for unless this war is in the end definitely won by the democracies, then any plans that we may have for the future will definitely be destroyed.”
Robin’s sojourn to the El Teniente mining camp, east of Rancagua, Chile is to visit her parents, Dr. Lelia and T. Wayne Skinner, and the home she knew as a child in “Campamento Americano.” Buster anticipates Lelia will ensure Robin returns with “a basic knowledge of home economics, a desire and energy to be a good housekeeper, the knack of making a real home…” Yet from the time Robin disembarks in the port of Valparaiso, it becomes her “summer to play in.”
With the sinking of the USS Reuben James, notably the first U.S. naval warship lost to hostile action of a German U-Boat, the situation turns from serious to grave. Buster obsesses over Robin’s perilous return up the Atlantic coast. In a letter to his bride he avows, “… If you don’t see your duty as I see mine, if you feel you would be happier at home in Chile, than you would be with me wherever I might be, then stay there until your heart calls you back to me.”
The next time Buster sets eyes on his bride will be after her shocking extramarital affair with a ski racer and the December 7 Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. By way of Pan Am Clipper and Eastern Airlines DC-3 “Silver Sleeper,” Robin returns in time to celebrate their first Christmas. Each young couple’s path advances in lockstep with military training and rank advancement. For the young Bedfords it’s New Jersey and Massachusetts, where their son Bobby is born, to Florida and Louisiana. All the while, Robin’s mother Lelia chases Robin and her sister, Dottie, by way of government censored handwritten letters, often taking… Six Weeks for Boat Mail.