05/12/2026
A year ago, I started reading my parents’ Vietnam-era letters for the very first time.
I didn’t even know these letters existed until 2021, when I cleaned out our family storage unit and found box after box of air mail envelopes.
Somehow, they had survived everything.
Including Hurricane Andrew.
In 1992, after Hurricane Andrew destroyed my family home in Miami, the letters were packed up and transported away with whatever else could be saved. A banyan tree came through the roof of my parents’ bedroom and onto their bed during the storm. We were on the north eyewall of Andrew, and like so many South Florida families, our lives were never quite the same afterward.
And yet these letters survived.
Actual air mail envelopes kept in boxes for more than fifty years.
When you open them, they still carry that old paper smell — musty, preserved time.
Before I could even begin the podcast, every letter had to be carefully placed back into chronological order, photocopied, and preserved so I wouldn’t have to keep unfolding the originals over and over again.
Then came the real work.
For the last year, almost every single day, I woke up around 4:30 in the morning before my regular workday to transcribe and read the letters.
Every day.
The podcast honestly began as a way to keep myself accountable. I thought if I committed to reading the letters publicly day by day, I would actually finish the project. And I also thought people might be more inclined to listen than sit down and read hundreds and hundreds of pages of letters.
Now I’m not so sure.
Some of these letters are so intimate, funny, emotional, and occasionally so unbelievably raunchy and X-***ed that reading them becomes an entirely different experience.
What started as a project slowly became something much bigger than I realized:
a love story,
a war story,
a pregnancy journal,
a family archive,
and eventually, part of my own story too.
When the letters begin, my mother is in San Antonio while my father is flying rescue missions in Vietnam.
But Miami is always there in the background.
The place they planned to return to.
The place where many of their closest friendships were rooted.
The place that eventually became part of my childhood too.
And after I was born, the letters slowly stop being only written between my parents and begin being written to me too.
That changes everything when you read them.
Recently was Mother’s Day, and being back in Miami — only a few blocks from where I grew up — has made this entire experience feel deeply emotional.
The banyan trees.
The royal poincianas my mother loved.
The frangipani blooming.
Mango trees heavy with fruit, mangoes dropping onto the sidewalks.
The humid air.
The birds in the morning.
Somehow it all still feels exactly the same.
It feels like memory lives in the landscape here.
Today, I’m headed back out on the water near Elliott Key — close to the place where I spread my parents’ ashes with two of my lifelong family friends, Kelly and Adam Spiegel Osman.
And somewhere between finishing these letters and being back here in Miami, I think I’m only now beginning to understand what this project actually was.
Not just a podcast.
Not just an archive.
But a way of finding my way back through the lives that created mine.
I’m incredibly proud that I stayed with this and finished it.
“The Allgoods: Vietnam Through the Eyes of Love” tells the story of my parents, Sarah and Dick Allgood — both Air Force captains — writing each other daily through the Vietnam War while building a family through the mail.
If you’d like to follow the story, I’ll put the website link below.
The podcast is available on major streaming platforms.
In 1971, two young Air Force veterans — Richard and Sarah Allgood — found themselves separated by the Vietnam War, yet connected through hundreds of heartfelt lette…
