Letters led to romance, wedding for young soldier

More than 58,000 young men were killed in the Vietnam War, most before they had a chance to experience much of adulthood.

John Petrovic was one of the lucky ones. The time-honored tradition of writing to the troops resulted in him having a full life: a wife, children, grandchildren and a happy marriage of nearly 50 years, actually all because of the war.

The Chicago Heights native was drafted not long after beginning work at the University of Chicago Book Publishing Department doing odds and ends in the studio. The Bloom High School graduate had received his associate’s degree from the American Academy of Art.

The Army soon nipped his blossoming career in the bud with the draft. After boot camp he ended up at helicopter school in Fort Rutger, Alabama. He turned down an offer to attend officer candidate school because it involved a longer enlistment and instead was assigned to be a helicopter crew chief, responsible for maintaining aircraft for the 48th Assault Helicopter Company, known as "The Blue Stars."

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Meanwhile, 14-year-old Lynn Hoerntlein got roped into writing to three soldiers when her two younger sisters attending St. Agnes School were required by their nun instructors to write to them. Her mother said, "Why don’t you write to them, too?"

Lynn said there was no way she was going to correspond with soldiers, but when her mother explained she had done it during World War II, Lynn agreed.

She wrote to three soldiers. One never wrote back. The second has remained a lifelong friend, the two bringing spouses and children into a family friendship as they raised kids. The third she promptly fell in love with.

Petrovic had been sent to Vietnam in February. He and Lynn began writing in March. By the middle of the summer they began writing each other every day.

"They were 10 and 15 pages," Lynn Petrovic said. "I’ve got every single one that he wrote me and the ones that I wrote him, we have some. He had to destroy a lot of them because he couldn’t bring them all home."

There was destiny involved in those letters.

"We knew before we met that we were going to get married," Lynn Petovic said. "I had never kissed a boy before, never dated."

John Petrovic, just worried about staying alive, certainly was taken off guard by the romance.

"It didn’t occur to me that that would happen," he said.

But in retrospect, he said, letter-writing obviously allowed for a deeper bond to form than regular dating.

"You pour your heart out in a letter sometimes that you wouldn’t do face to face," he said.

They got engaged during Lynn’s junior year in high school. When Petrovic landed in Seattle after completing his tour in Vietnam, he called her.

"That was the first time I ever heard his voice," she said.

They married June 28, 1969, at ages 18 and 24, and still are going strong 45 years later. The romance was the highlight of Petrovic’s homecoming, but the young and happy couple faced the same challenges as many others after returning from Vietnam, including John’s post-traumatic stress and Lynn’s complete ignorance of what the war had been like for him.

"He didn’t tell me anything," she said.

"I remember when I was home on leave and a car backfired and I ended up flat on my face in the parking lot and people were looking at me like I was crazy," he said. "I sort of brushed myself off and said, ‘Loud noises sort of have an effect on me.’ "

After leaving the Army, Petrovic went back to work for the University of Chicago, moving from hand-setting placards and business cards to computer publishing of the university’s periodicals such as Astrophysical Journal, Law Review and Poetry Magazine. When the university outsourced its publishing in 1983, Petrovic lost his job.

For two or three years he worked as a maintenance man at Lincoln-Way High School in Frankfort, Illinois, while doing telemarketing at night. Eventually he added nightly classes to his load to become a union operating engineer and upon reaching journeyman began a 19-year career for the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Chicago.

He retired in 2010, lives in Crown Point, Indiana, and now enjoys pen-and-ink drawing and acrylic painting, which has won some juried awards including a blue ribbon at the Lake County Fair. The Petrovics have three children and seven grandkids.

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