Amy Rodman Little was four years old when two uniformed men walked up to her family’s front door in Hanover, Pennsylvania. Her father, Army Captain David “Dave” Rodman, had been killed in Vietnam on May 8, 1968, during some of the heaviest American losses of the war. Called south near an area known as the French Cemetery, the artillery officer ordered a helicopter down to rescue soldiers under fire. He helped get the wounded aboard, and as the helicopter lifted off, he was shot and killed. He was just shy of six months in country, two weeks from meeting his wife in Hawaii for R&R. Her packed suitcase was waiting at home.
Amy grew up loved. Her grandparents told the family that “life is for the living,” and her mother later married Don, a high school classmate who became the only father Amy and her sister Lori really knew. But Amy couldn’t stop wondering who her first father was. As a girl, she asked again and again for his letters, and no one knew where they were. Then, around age 30, her mother mentioned a box in the garage that Amy’s grandmother had given her years earlier. Inside were Dave’s wedding ring, his college recruitment letters, and 45 handwritten letters from Vietnam, held together with an old rubber band.
The letters showed her a real man, not just a name on a plaque. Dave was a former Big 33 All-State football player who left law school for the Army and volunteered for Vietnam. He could be frustrated and outspoken, especially about a Tet ceasefire that let the enemy restock, and about rules of engagement that sent targets slipping away while he waited for clearance. He was funny too. He wrote about throwing up on “Charlie” from a Bird Dog spotter plane, and about a rat that ate the lid off his care package before it got to the brownies. And he kept asking about his wife and his little girls. To understand what he was writing about, Amy read and watched everything she could find about Vietnam. She visited The Wall. At a reunion at Fort Sill, his Army friends walked her through the howitzers he had described. She started stopping veterans in Costco to thank them, because she’d read that they were never welcomed home.
That journey became the book Love, Dave: Letters to Home – A Daughter’s Journey to Know the Father She Lost in Vietnam. Along the way, a Vietnam veteran handed her one of his own Purple Hearts and told her she had earned it. The Big 33 dedicated a football game to her father. She also joined an Honor Flight to Washington, D.C., where she walked beside a former POW as a cheering crowd told him “welcome home,” something he said he had never heard before. When her mother recently asked whether she finally felt closure, Amy said yes. More than 55 years after losing him, she says she finally knows her dad.
Read Dave’s letters for yourself: Love, Dave is available in paperback (https://lovedavebook.org/products/love-dave) and as an eBook on Amazon (https://a.co/d/05ORteQG).