Eva Saenz, my pen pal in Corpus Christi when we first met, about 3 months back from Nam. Her letters helped me through the jungles of my mind. Our 50th Anniversary will be this year (2022) I’m originally from California, San Francisco bay area but when I transferred from the fourth division up to the America, I had a day or two in July and I think I got some herbal
essence or something, and the next day I walked into a USO building. They had a snack bar and some writing tables and some other stuff. There was a bulletin board and a bunch of letters attached to that bulletin board, and I pulled this letter from this young girl young lady from Corpus Christi, Texas by the name Eva Sines. I wrote this really weird letter to her and we started communicating. It was her letters that helped me through the jungles of my mind, is what I like to say, thank you, God, because she was an English major at Texas A&I in Kingsville. At the time she had written a letter because a girlfriend of hers lost her fiancé over there thought it’d be a good idea to send a letter to somebody and she hooked me. When I got out of the army I ended up buying a 65 Volkswagen camper van and started traveling from San Francisco Bay area down to Corpus Christi. It took me a few months because I had some adventures along the way, I had three weeks in the hospital with malaria but I got down there about three months later in November. I got out in august 71 and we were together, got engaged, and long story short we now have been married 50 years. We spent time in Corpus Christi and spent 20 years in San Francisco bay area because I worked there in San Francisco and then in 98 we moved back here to Texas and we lived in Spring, Texas now. There’s a story that you don’t see or hear too often, but she’s made my life much better in all means and put up with all this crap that I had going on.
Dennis Loop serves as the board secretary for the Vietnam Combat Veterans Associations.