‘If the Army had wanted you to have a wife, it would have issued you one.” It’s an oft-repeated quip within the armed forces. As Susan Carruthers demonstrates in “Dear John: Love and Loyalty in Wartime America,” it takes a very sturdy relationship to survive the institutional culture of the military.
Ms. Carruthers, a professor of U.S. and international history at the University of Warwick in England, takes as her central motif the “Dear John letter”—a breakup note sent by a woman at home to her man in uniform overseas. The term was first used, we are told, in a national newspaper in October 1943. Such letters have since become a symbol of the female treachery that can damage a man as deeply as the wartime loss of life or limb.
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