Every Christmas for the last nine years, the card arrived in the mail.

It started in 2002, when veteran Terry Feavel wrote to the newspaper on a mission to repay an old debt. He had been a 21-year-old Marine on the front lines of the Vietnam War during the Christmas of 1965 when three little letters from Hawaii got into his hands. It bothered him that he had never written back.

The letters weren’t even addressed to him. They just said, "Mr. Marine" and "Mr. Marine in Vietnam," written on binder paper in the careful script of 9-year-olds. The letters had been part of a class assignment for Mrs. Yoshishige’s fourth-grade class at Pearl City Highlands Elementary.

"Over there, the one thing you look forward to is mail. I mean, you can’t get enough of it," Feavel said. "Back home, I only had my mom and dad and my sister write to me. When I got those letters from those girls, it was such a joy."

The letters were very simple:

"I am writing this letter to thank you for serving our country in Vietnam."

And: "If you think the teacher corrected this, she didn’t. She told us to think of our own thoughts so I am doing it right now … P.S. Have a merry Christmas!"

Feavel loved those letters so much that he sent them home to his parents in Wisconsin so they wouldn’t get ruined in the constant Vietnam rain. When his father died in 2001, Feavel went to the house to sort through belongings and found the three letters saved in a box. It had been 37 years, but those notes still affected him the same way, perhaps even more so. He decided to try to find the kids — now adults — who had wished him well that one hard Christmas in the war zone. He tried finding the writers through the school, but elementary schools don’t often keep alumni directories. In 2002, before Facebook, his next step was to send the letters to a newspaper, and they ended up on my desk.

Sometimes finding people takes intricate sleuthing. That time it was miraculously easy. Wendy Miyama’s parents lived in the same Pearl City house that they had in 1965 and she just happened to be visiting when I called. Pam Shingaki was the cousin of a friend; she had been to my house. And Lynne Matsuo was a copy editor a few desks away at the newspaper.

That year and every Christmas since 2002, Feavel said thank you, sending cards to the three letter writers and to me, with simple notes like, "I’ll never forget what you did for me," even though probably all of us didn’t think what we did was very big; we just wrote some words on paper. Terry Feavel, 66, of Appleton, Wis., died on May 5 of this year. I missed getting his card this Christmas.

Lee Cataluna can be reached at lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.