News for Southwest MichiganRSS

WMUK Archive

Book gives in-depth look at American Wars through letters of men and women caught in the conflict

By: Rebecca Thiele
Kalamazoo, MI
February 8, 2012
WMUK

Please install Flash

Listen to the full interview with Andrew Carroll (16:40)


The book War Letters is a compilation of letters written by men and women caught up in conflicts from the Civil War to Bosnia. The best-seller is one result of The Legacy Project, an initiative that preserves wartime correspondences. The author of War Letters and founder of The Legacy Project Andrew Carroll is coming to Western Michigan University’s campus to speak this Friday afternoon.

[Andrew Carroll] "One of the ironies of this whole initiative is that I am not in the military and did not come from a military family. And right before Christmas, our house in Washington D.C. completely burned down. Everything was destroyed. The worst thing--nobody was hurt, which was obviously the most important thing--is that all of our family letters were wiped out. Even though they weren't related to war it was just these very tangible reminisces from my grandparents and other people. And it just got me thinking about the importance of letters. I was shocked by how many of my father's friends who were veterans said to me 'I threw out my old letters. Yep, just tossed them in the garbage.' And it seemed to me we were losing something as a country. So, on a whim, I wrote to Dear Abby, the advice columnist who every once in a while wrote columns about veterans' issues. I told her I wanted to launch an initiative to encourage Americans to preserve wartime correspondence. She ran that column on November 11th, 1998 and it's like the floodgates opened. I set up this little P.O. box at the local post office and I was getting inundated with just thousands and thousands of letters that people had written. And that's really how the whole thing began."

[Rebecca Thiele] Talk about your process of trying to gather these letters, especially the ones that are ancient, like the Civil War era.

[Caroll] And the Revolution. We're up to 85,000, 90,000 letters and e-mails from every single conflict in U.S. history. Dating back to handwritten missives in the American Revolution up in to electronic e-mails from Afghanistan, Iraq, other parts of the world on peace-keeping missions and literally everything in between. The first letters we got were initially combat letters. I think that's what most people conceive of a war letter, something to do with fighting and being in the midst of combat. As the project expanded we started getting more nuanced letters. We got love letters, letters from the home front. I especially love those because I think we so often overlook the people here; the spouses, the siblings, the parents, the children of troops and what they go through. Being back in the states while their significant other is fighting overseas. And in some ways it is more worrysome and anxiety ridden being here wondering what's going on than it is being in the middle of the action. It's amazing how many troops have said that to me. We also have letters that are humorus, letters that we right at the epicenter of history. We have a young sailor who was in a ship at Pearl Harbor. Describing what it was like to be there as the bombs were falling. We have former slaves writing to their ex-masters saying ‘I’m coming back to the plantation, but this time I’m with a thousand fellow armed black troops and we’ll beat the slave-holding rebels for what the did to us. Just really dramatic and intense accounts and really powerful emotions that come through. And I think that’s what really distinguishes war letters from other correspondences, that by definition, they’re written in these life and death circumstances. They tend to be more intense, they also tend to be more philosophical. One of the things that was most compelling to me about these correspondences is that even though the letter writers are as young as 17, 18 years old, they have such profound insights into human nature. There’s so much wisdom because of what they’ve seen and what they’ve done. They’ll experience some things in a week or a day that some of us will experience in a lifetime. You have these letters that contain these profound and thoughtful insights about the human condition itself.

[Thiele] You have a brief note just putting that letter in the context of the times . Why did you decide that that was really important in this book?

[Carroll] We’ve done a couple books based on these letters, all previously unpublished. The first one was War Letters and there was Behind the Lines. So those headnotes that I put in, I really wanted to give the reader a sense of who the writer was. Who was this young man or woman? Where is he from? Who is he writing to? Did he survive? What were the conditions under which he was writing? I have a letter by a young man who on his 22nd birthday was writing back to his mom during World War II. He was literally in the cross-hairs of a German sniper as he was writing this letter home. And again, it’s a very philosophical letter about the values on learns in life and how at his young age he appreciated this. It’s a very sweet letter cause he ends it by saying ‘Pretty convinced I’ve grown up, Mom, but I still count on you tucking me into bed when I get home.’ And I think it’s important for the reader to know that soon after he wrote that letter, he was killed. He had done something very extraordinary before he died and had won the congressional medal of honor for his actions. Just knowing that about who he was going in, he was just a Midwestern kid writing back to his family, and what happens afterwards puts that letter in context. I think it gives it more weight and significance just knowing what happened.

Andrew Carroll will speak at WMU Friday at 2 p.m. in Schneider Hall. Carroll encourages all military families to submit their letters to the project.

© Copyright 2012, WMUK

 
Partners