What to write to someone at basic training

You have the address. You have a pen. And you have nothing, because everything you think of sounds either too heavy or too stupid to send.

That feeling is near universal and it is worth saying plainly: the letter does not have to be good. Mail call is the entire event. A short letter about the dog arriving on a Tuesday beats a beautiful letter you are still drafting in three weeks.

Write about nothing

This is the single most useful thing to know, and it is the opposite of what people expect.

Recruits are living in a place with no news, no phone, no choices and no variety. What they want from home is not encouragement. It is evidence that ordinary life is still happening.

So write about:

• What you had for dinner
• The dog, at length, with detail nobody would ordinarily tolerate
• Who won the game
• The neighbour's ongoing dispute about the fence
• What the weather has been doing
• A small thing that broke and how you fixed it

Letters full of "we are so proud of you" get read once. Letters about your mother's argument with the pharmacy get read four times and then read out loud to the bay.

Send more, shorter

Volume beats length. Five short letters over two weeks land better than one long one, because each is a separate mail call where a name gets called.

If you have nothing to say, say that in four lines and send it anyway.

What to leave out

Some of this is practical and some is kindness.

• Bad news that they cannot act on. If the car died, they cannot help, and they will carry it for six weeks. Sit on it if you can.
• Anything that makes them look soft in front of others. Mail sometimes gets read aloud. Nicknames and perfume on the envelope are a real cost paid by somebody who cannot answer back.
• Contraband. No food, no sweets, no gum, no photographs that would embarrass them. Many programmes prohibit anything but paper. Check what their specific programme allows before sending a single item.
• Pressure about writing back. They may get very little time to reply, sometimes almost none. Telling them you are hurt by the silence is a weight they cannot put down.

Answer their questions, but do not wait for them

Letters cross in the post. If you wait to reply to their last letter, and they wait to reply to yours, you both end up sending nothing for a fortnight. Write on your own schedule.

Number them

Put a small number in the corner of each letter. Mail arrives out of order, sometimes in batches of six after ten days of nothing, and a numbered stack is one they can read in sequence.

It also means that later, when these are in a drawer, you will both know what came first.

The one to write on the first night

If you write nothing else, write this one on the day they leave, before you have anything to report.

Tell them what the house was like when you got back from the airport. Tell them who cried and who did not. Tell them the thing you meant to say at the gate and did not manage.

They will not get it for a week or more. It will arrive at the point where the shock has worn off and the tiredness has not, and it is the one that gets kept.

Afterwards

The letters come home in a bag or a boot or an envelope, and then they sit in a drawer for twenty years because nobody knows what else to do with them.

They fade. Pencil especially. And the handwriting is half of what they are: nobody rereads a boot camp letter for the information in it.

After the Oath is one place to put them. Photograph a letter and it is read into text you can actually search, with the photograph of the handwriting kept alongside it. The whole family can add to the same page, so the letters your mother kept and the photographs your sister has stop being two separate piles. Free to start, and nothing you add is ever locked or deleted.