Dear John/Joanne Letters, have you had one?

Coming Home -- To a war-weary nation, a U.S. POW's return from captivity in Vietnam in 1973 looked like the happiest of reunions

Carolyn Kleiner Butler, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2005

Sitting in the back seat of a station wagon on the tarmac at Travis Air Force Base, in California, clad in her favorite fuchsia miniskirt, 15-year-old Lorrie Stirm felt that she was in a dream. It was March 17, 1973, and it had been six long years since she had last seen her father, Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm, an Air Force fighter pilot who was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and had been missing or imprisoned ever since. She simply couldn't believe they were about to be reunited. The minutes crept by like hours, she recalls, and then, all at once, the car door opened. "I just wanted to get to Dad as fast as I could," Lorrie says. She tore down the runway toward him with open arms, her spirits—and feet—flying. Her mother, Loretta, and three younger siblings—Robert Jr., Roger and Cindy—were only steps behind. "We didn't know if he would ever come home," Lorrie says. "That moment was all our prayers answered, all our wishes come true."

It remains the quintessential homecoming photograph of the time. Stirm, 39, who had endured gunshot wounds, torture, illness, starvation and despair in North Vietnamese prison camps, including the infamous Hanoi Hilton, is pictured in a crisp new uniform. Because his back is to the camera, as Veder points out, the officer seems anonymous, an everyman who represented not only the hundreds of POW's released that spring but all the troops in Vietnam who would return home to the mothers, fathers, wives, daughters and sons they'd left behind. "It's a hero's welcome for guys who weren't always seen or treated as heroes," says Donald Goldstein, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and a coauthor of The Vietnam War: The Stories and The Photographs, of the Stirm family reunion picture. "After years of fighting a war we couldn't win, a war that tore us apart, it was finally over, and the country could start healing."

But there was more to the story than captured on film. Three days before Stirm landed at Travis, a chaplain had handed him a Dear John letter from his wife. "I can't help but feel ambivalent about it," Stirm says today of the photograph. "I was very pleased to see my children—I loved them all and still do, and I know they had a difficult time—but there was a lot to deal with." Lorrie says, "So much had happened—there was so much that my dad missed out on—it took a while to let him back into our lives and accept his authority." Her parents were divorced within a year . . . .

My ex took off while I was deployed to Saudi for Desert Shield/Desert Storm... Yes, I am that old!! Luckily, when I returned I sat before a judge who was a retired LTC. I was divorced in 90 days and it cost me all of $90. I pawned everything she left behind. I spent an hour negotiating the price he would pay to an expectably low price and sent her the check, as agreed.

Are there really still "Dear John" letters? I thought that the current practice was to just change your Facebook status to "single" or the even more dreaded "it's complicated"? ;)