Chris and Gunnar Sand’s Story Part One

After my mother died in 2005, I became keenly aware of being an orphan.  Dad had died in 1984, having suffered for many months with a cancer that left him skeletal.

My brother Scott and I began the tremendous task of clearing out our family home in Clara City, MN.  For months, we spent one night a week going through boxes and closets and rooms filled with our parents' things.  Our parents grew up in the Depression and experienced WWII first hand as they were 18 and 19 when Pearl Harbor was bombed.  True to the pack-rat qualities of those days, our house was a treasure trove of history.  As we began this clearing and cleaning, Scott and I found tidbits of items from those war days.  Rationing books, letters, photos of men in uniform, clothing items and Army insignia, and when we found the medals and Nazi "booty", we began putting these things in a pile to keep safe and sort through later.  [I know that there were some items we inadvertently tossed or brought to Good Will that should be in this collection and I still become sick-to-my-stomach about with regret when I think of this].

For me, it started with the letters.  There were about 20 letters with red and blue edging addressed to Mom, (though it was her maiden name at the time), from our Dad.  The years were from 1943-1944, and the return address was from an APO in New York City with Dad's Bomb Group (388) and Bomb Squad (562) and his Army Serial Number after his name.  There was also some returned mail from Mom to Dad and some V-Mail.  Thus, after some months of collecting these from various boxes and areas in the house, it appeared I had them all, and one evening, I brought them all out.  I laid the collected letters out on my kitchen table and began sorting them by date.  Some letters were not in their envelopes, and some envelopes were empty, or had other things in them.  Most that referred to having a picture did not have any pictures in them.  Despite many missing pieces, I was able to amass a little vignette of my parents' budding love amidst the horror of WWII.  It took no less than 2 full hours to actually read the letters.  This, of course, included some breaks to cry, blow my nose, smoke and mix a drink as I worked on absorbing this completely never-before-thought-of aspect of Mom-and-Dad.  That evening marked the beginning of a journey that brought me to becoming a "Barbed-Wire Sister" with Laura.

Laura and Chris with her grandkids Aliyah and Jayden, and a B24.