The recently reported killing in Syria of Kayla Mueller by the despicable ISIS (ISIL in official US government parlance) murderers brings me back to distant memories of undergraduate and later days at the University of Rochester and the Vietnam War era.

The love of my last two years of life at the University of Rochester (1964-66) was a smart, beautiful, redheaded, English major named Sandra Lee Taplin.  She was from Clarence, a town near Buffalo, New York.  That she cared for me at all is, in retrospect, a little hard to understand. She took her studies seriously (a straight A student, while I scrapped along at a few hundredths of a percentage point above a passing C), didn’t drink much (I was a fairly typical frat bozo who kept too many empty beer bottles on display to prove manliness), and spent much time in Rush Rhees Library (where I regularly joined her in studying–most likely the only reason I possessed those few hundredths of a percentage points noted above).

As my first posts noted, I was destined for the Marine Corps— provided  I graduated (thank you, Sandy.) At some point during the five months of training after my commissioning to be an officer in Quantico, Virginia, Sandy wrote to tell me that our relationship was over. I don’t possess her “Dear John” letter any longer, but my memory of it ties her decision to my impending  involvement in the war in Vietnam and her inability to support it. I could be wrong in remembering it that way, and even if that is what she said, there may have been other reasons of her own, but it doesn’t matter. I accepted it. Anger toward her was simply not possible for me. I did love her.  Love is not “ownership” and love allows for parting.

I did look Sandy up after my tour ended  in February 1968. She was a senior then. I recall meeting her, with others, in Todd Student Union on campus and talking about the war. Knowing she had come to oppose it, I remember defending it. I told her of the acts of the Viet Cong–stealing the harvests of the peasants and forcing young men to join their forces and of their atrocities on the battlefields. It was our last conversation. I can’t say it ended badly or well. It just ended.

I suppose we all think back on past relationships and wonder where those acquaintances, friends, and loves have gotten to. A couple I have had the good fortune to reconnect with–and I am happy for reconnections.

This would not happen with Sandy. Somewhere along the line I learned she went into the Peace Corps after graduating and on her first assignment (I wrongly thought in El Salvador) she had died. I had details wrong—the location and the reason. But she had died for a serious cause in Bolivia, a seriously good cause. One source: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19690920&id=RfRNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=sYoDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5994,2267724

I recount this story here because I want to make plain that sacrifice for a greater good takes many forms—not all of them having to do with warfare and arms. English-major Sandra Lee Taplin turned to the Peace Corps, and she made the “ultimate sacrifice.”

I often wonder if a conversation Sandy and I had about the study of English (English literature, actually) had anything to do with her decision. We shared the major. She majored in the subject because it was her passion. I majored in it because I couldn’t succeed in (or like) biology, psychology, or math. I had told her the major was pointless. What effect could one ever have on anything by studying that field? It was a tearful exchange for her. It was easy for me (hatefully so in repeated, involuntary recollection). English mattered little to me as a field. I managed a BA and a commission in the Marine Corps and–it turned out–a living. The major mattered almost nothing in that equation.

Did Sandy’s decision to go into the Peace Corps in any way grow out of that conversation? I’ll never know.

But I admire and hold her in great esteem for having made the decision.

These days the talk of “ultimate sacrifice” comes easy and has become kind of trite sounding when applied to those who have died bearing arms.

In Sandra Lee Taplin’s case, her dying in Bolivia is not at all so. I was and continue to be awed.