Phyllis Wyman lays the letters out on the kitchen table in her Pittsfield farmhouse.

She’s careful to make sure they are all in order, the one written earliest first, right up to the last one received. She handles them carefully, their crumbling papers held lightly between her fingers.

They all bear the same firm handwriting; all written from the same young Marine toward the end of World War II.

The paper envelopes have darkened with age and the edges of some are singed, nearly lost entirely in a house fire more than 35 years ago. All have a dark circle stamped on them. It reads: “Passed by Naval Censor.”

It is the tiny letter on the top, the very first one she received, that is the most precious. Inside the small, brown paper envelope is the letter Jasper Wyman, a Deer Isle boy far from home, wrote from the battlefield on Iwo Jima in 1945, when Phyllis was a girl in Stonington, playing softball and catching smelts.The letters on the kitchen table tell the story of a young man of 19, terrified at the war he was living through, reaching out and being embraced by a teen-age girl on an island off the coast of Maine more than half a century ago.

Today, Phyllis and Jasper Wyman of Pittsfield have been married 55 years. He did come home from the Pacific battlefront. She did wait for him.

‘That little girl’

Jasper Wyman, now 76, was raised on Deer Isle. “I can remember going to the dances at the American Legion hall and having some of the parents say to me, ‘Dance at least one dance with little Phyllis,’ a neighbor,” he recalls. “I was 15, after all, and she was three years younger than me. That’s how I thought of her for years, as that little girl at the dances.”

As he grew to manhood, the Wyman boy forgot all about the dark-haired girl with the engaging smile.

As a teen-ager, Jasper became a deckhand on the schooner “Annie and Reuben” out of Stonington. “The ship leaked like a sieve and we had a dory on board in case she sunk,” he recalls with a hearty laugh.

“We were en route from Deer Isle to Boston with a hold full of monument granite when the word came over the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor,” he recounts.

The voyage took from November to February, Jasper recalls, and in February 1943, at age 17, he enlisted in the Marines. “We were all so young and gung-ho. We wanted to go.”

He became a radioman, carrying the 45-pound transmitter on his back in tandem with another radioman who carried the generator. Within weeks, Jasper was shipped to Hawaii where he was assigned to the 4th Marine Division and sent to sea. “No

one knew where we were going,” he recalls.

They were going into hell.

Baptism by fire

First Saipan, then Tinian and finally Iwo Jima. Key strongholds for the Japanese and vital as a stopover for U.S. pilots. “Once we took Saipan and Tinian, they knew we were within bombing distance of Japan,” he says.

It was baptism by fire. Nineteen-year-old Jasper went over the side of a landing craft onto Yellow Beach One. “Once on Saipan, we came under intense shelling. A little boy, of 5 or 7; put my arm around him.” Jasper stops, the tears gathering. “We were both scared to death,” he whispers. “Every time a shell would hit, it would lift you right off the ground.”

Jasper’s partner radioman looked at him and said, “We’re not going to make it,” and Jasper admits he began “plea bargaining with God.”

The U.S. Navy shot 330 of just more than 400 Japanese planes from the air. More than 3,000 Marines died on Saipan.

But it was only beginning for Jasper. Within weeks, he landed on Tinian. “Somehow we managed to get ashore on two narrow beaches, White Beach One and Two.”

Still, the worst was yet to come. Once Tinian was captured, Jasper went on to land at Iwo Jima.

“It was the most violent battle ever,” he recalls softly, shaking his head and adjusting his ball cap. “It went on for 36 days. Nearly 7,000 lives were lost there.”

Jasper, as a radioman, was a member of the 1st JASCO (Joint Assault Signal Company) and had been transferred to the 2nd Battalion, 25th Regiment.

He was terrified upon storming Iwo Jima. The ramps lowered for landing, and Jasper says he “started to run in that volcanic ash, up beyond my ankles. There wasn’t a bit of cover, not even a bush. I dashed out as far as I could go and dropped to the ground. I could see four Marines to my left and four to my right. They were dead already.”

“The Japanese shelled all night long. It was raining and I couldn’t stop shaking.” Jasper’s best friend ran out to relieve another radioman at dawn and took a direct hit. Other friends, whose names are always still on the tip of his tongue, went down: Driggs, Sikorski, “Rugged,” he recalls.

A flag raising

On the morning of the fifth day of shelling, with bombs dropping all around, Jasper still had his face “buried in the ash. I happened to look up and there, just one-half mile away, I saw the American flag being raised. Tears rolled down my face.” That most famous of scenes brought hope to the Maine boy, who says, “When I saw that flag, I didn’t know how, but I knew I was going to get off that island.”

On the ninth day of battle, from a post office constructed of two boards with a tarp slung over them, Jasper received a letter. “It was a little v-mail,” he recalls. “It was from Phyllis.” The v-mail letters, a government-sponsored pen pal program designed to keep up soldiers’ morale, were sent free of postage.

“I was on my knees, in the ash, shells still dropping around me and I was reading that letter from Maine. You can imagine what it meant to me, a touch of home. Her words, describing the moonlight on the Maine ocean … the tears flowed, I’ll admit.

“My first thought was, ‘If I live through this, I’m going to write and thank her,’ ” he says.

And he did, the first letter written on his knees from a six-man tent in the dirt on Iwo Jima, in the midst of artillery fire.

Phyllis’ stack of letters from Jasper tells the story of their romance: 44 letters written from March 12 to Oct. 27, 1945.

“Dear Phyllis” soon became “Dearest Phyllis” and the pair fell in love over seven months of correspondence.

He began calling her “Dutchess” and she called him “Duke.”

Casual writings about mutual acquaintances turned to words of commitment and of building a life together.

Jasper had found a safe harbor, someone he felt would understand his war experiences and make his life easier once he came home.

May 15, 1945: “I think you understand what I meant about coming home to peace and all the pleasant things I once overlooked and which mean so much to me now.”

July 24, 1945: “It will be different when I get home. I will try to forget all this, I hope. You will help me, won’t you?”

And Phyllis had found a romantic. “I had been writing to 15 or so soldiers – that was what you did to help then, you became a pen pal – but no one wrote me letters like Jasper,” she says. Another excerpt from his writings illustrates her point.

Oct. 16, 1945: “I tell you what, darling, when the Statue of Liberty walks across the Pacific Ocean, then I won’t love you anymore. Until that happens, you have nothing to worry about.”

“Somewhere along the way,” says Phyllis, “I promised to wait for him.”

On Oct. 27, 1945, four days before Jasper’s discharge, he wrote, “Dutchess darling, I’ll be seeing you in a few days. Gosh, I am too happy to even write.”

A long-awaited visit

Discharged on Halloween morning 1945 in San Diego, Jasper hopped on the first train headed east. He told the porter, “I don’t care if you strap me to the top of a boxcar, I’m going home.”

The Marine went straight to Prospect were he borrowed a car – a green 1936 Ford – and headed for Deer Isle.

It was late afternoon and dusk was just settling in when Jasper rang the doorbell of Phyllis’ grandmother’s house and his Dutchess opened the door. “She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. She came to the door with a little white blouse with a little black tie and a black skirt,” Jasper says, recalling each detail. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

“He’d written me that he wanted a proper greeting,” says Phyllis, so she embraced him and kissed his cheek. That evening, the couple went to the movies – “Lassie Come Home” was playing – and held hands. A few weeks later while shopping in Bangor, they agreed to wed.

Phyllis graduated from high school in June and they were married in August. They started out with $500, a new pair of shoes and a shotgun. She was 17 and he was 20.

Last summer they celebrated their 55th anniversary. They have had seven children, including former state representative and U.S. Senate candidate Jasper S. Wyman, and adopted two more. They boarded foster children for 15 years. They’ve picked potatoes together, worked in shoe factories, paper mills, and defense industries. They’ve been a cook and a chauffeur; they’ve run a dairy farm.

Today, life is slower and easier and there’s plenty of time for reflection. They sit by the wood stove and watch deer and turkey feeding on their 156-acre farm in rural Pittsfield. Jasper serves on the town’s zoning board, having already been a town councilor, deputy mayor and planning board member.

And last week, after retrieving the treasured letters from a safe in Deer Isle, Phyllis had Jasper read her every last one, over and over.

“The events of September 11 have me thinking about all those experiences again,” Jasper admits. He pulls out old pictures, his dress uniform, his medals. “Freedom comes at such a price,” he says. “For many, many years, I didn’t talk about the war or the memories. I would get too emotional.”

The couple is quiet for a minute or two, lost in the past.

Then, Phyllis sings a few bars of “their” song – “I’ll be loving you, always … always,” and, while watching her arrange the envelopes neatly on the table, Jasper whispers, “I’d give a million dollars, every single dollar, to ride that train home to Deer Isle and ring that doorbell again.”