‘It can’t be, there’s no way’: Gulf War pen pals find each other 30 years later

HENDERSON, Nev. (KVVU/Gray News) – During the Gulf War, a serviceman in Saudi Arabia found comfort in letters written from a high schooler in Chicago.

Now, more than 30 years later, the two finally met in person – shocked to discover they only live seven minutes apart in the Las Vegas Valley.

Back in the early 1990s, then-14-year-old Marcy Alfrejd received an English assignment to write a letter to a servicemember.

Of her entire English class, Alfrejd said she was the only student to receive a response back. It was from Navy Corpsman Gordon Ashlee, who was 36 at the time.

“I grabbed one and opened it and read it from Marcy, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really nice that they do that,’ so I felt kind of like I should write back, so I did,” Ashlee said.

It led to years of correspondence.

“I would tell him what my assignments were, or what I was working on at school,” Alfrejd said.

But eventually, those responses stopped coming.

Now, 30 years later, Alfrejd was looking through a box of keepsakes at her parent’s house when she came across the letters she saved.

She decided to try to find Ashlee through social media. She found someone by the name Gordon Ashlee on Facebook and sent him a message that read:

“Hi Gordon, my name is Marcy, and I’m looking for someone that I was a pen pal with in the 1990s. Did you happen to serve in the military, specifically Desert Storm?”

She got a response, surprised to find out not only had she found her longtime pen pal, but they now both live in Hendersonville, Nevada.

In fact, they live only seven minutes apart.

“It can’t be, there’s no way that’s the exact same person,” Alfrejd said, recalling her initial reaction.

Alfrejd moved to the area seven years ago for her business. Ashlee and his wife moved to Henderson for retirement in 2020.

Now, living so close, they have plenty of opportunity to catch up on decades of memories.

“To reconnect as friends now was cool for me because of our past, and just that connection we have,” Ashlee said.

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