A Letter Home

The letter arrived about midmorning. By noon, thanks to motherly Mrs. Florence Ethel Colby, 60, who minded the village switchboard in the parlor of her white frame house, everyone in Geetingsville, Ind. (pop. 27) knew what the letter said: "Dear Mom and Dad: This is awful hard to tell. My chaplain told me to write and tell you that I am charged with murder and have been sentenced to be shot. Get an attorney and try to have this sentence reduced." It was signed: "Bob."

From the nine farm houses of Geetingsville the story hummed out into the Indiana farmlands. Soil-grimed men muttered to themselves: "It can't be so." Not the Bobby Colby they had known: he had gone to church regularly, did his farm chores all right--except that he would not even kill the chicken for Sunday dinner. The Rev. Lenn L. Latham said: "Some people say they think that psychologically the Army made a killer out of him."

Around the 110-year-old Presbyterian church, Bobby's 60-year-old father, Lance, tended the town's graveyard. Now & then he paused to look at a sign which read: Commit thy way unto the Lord. To friends he said: "If he did it, he was drove to it."

At the Colby home, Bobby's mother tidied up her son's room, which was still the way he had left it--pin-up girls and airplane pictures on the wall, a radio and Popular Science on the table, his civilian clothes hanging in the closet. He had been in the North African campaign, then in the Normandy invasion, the Battle of the Bulge, and is now in Germany.

Exactly what had happened, no one in Geetingsville knew. Both the War Department in Washington and ETO headquarters in Frankfurt refused to divulge the facts of Bobby's crime.

So the staunch, God-fearing people of the countryside wrote a letter to Harry Truman. Then they turned elsewhere. A hundred of them trooped into the church, prayed for Bobby Colby and spoke the 40th Psalm in unison: "For innumerable evils have compassed me about. . . . They are more than the hairs of my head. . . . O Lord, make haste to help. . . "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.