Romantic War

From The Stars and Stripes:

"Saving the War Letters"

In his spare Washington apartment, author and popular historian Andrew Carroll stood over a dining room table, delicately sifting through stacks of letters written by the troops who fought every American war. They range from Revolutionary War epistles in exacting penmanship to hastily banged-out Iraq War emails, and everything in between. At least one has a bullet hole in it, some are splashed with battlefield mud and blood and others were finished hours before the writer died in combat. Spurred by a hunger for an unvarnished history of American warfare written by those who lived it, Carroll has been tracking down, writing about and storing these messages since 1998. They’ve been the basis of two best-selling books from which he’s donated all profits to veteran’s charities. He says plans to continue working with them for the rest of his life as part of his Legacy Project, designed to honor veterans by preserving their correspondence. What he hasn’t always been able to do is take care of the letters the way he believes they deserve. From thousands of contributors who have read about his letters project or seen him on television, Carroll has amassed what he calls a “small hill” of war letters. His conservative estimate is 100,000 letters; he’s never fully accounted for them all as they’ve poured in over the years, filling storage lockers and safe deposit boxes and bins on the floor of his apartment. That’s partly why, despite his passion for the collection, he gave it all away last year to Chapman University, a liberal arts college near Anaheim, Calif. Chapman is eager to take on the tasks Carroll admits he’s never had time, expertise or resources for — professionally preserving the letters, and scanning and archiving them in a database so they’ll be available for teachers, students and history buffs. He had been collaborating with John Benitz, a Chapman associate professor of theater and playwright, on two productions based on the letters. He was increasingly wooed by the atmosphere of the campus, and decided to approach administrators about setting up a center to preserve and make them accessible. The answer was an enthusiastic yes.

 “For years I’ve wanted to find an institution to give these letters,” he said. “I just had the feeling the letters would be locked up in storage and never see the light of day.” Reassured that would not be the case at Chapman, he hired Two Marines Moving, a veteran-owned moving company, to haul the trove to the university last fall. He’s holding on to only a handful of letters that were key parts of his books “War Letters” and “Behind the Lines.” He plans to spend much of this spring and summer on a new phase of his project, in which he’ll visit all 50 states to speak at veterans halls, history museums and military bases about the value of historical letters — hopefully collecting some along the way. The tour will kick off at a May 20 event on Capitol Hill sponsored by Chapman alum Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif. Current plans call for Chapman’s Center for American War Letters to open Nov. 5, the week before Veteran’s Day, he said. Carroll will divide his time between Washington and the university, where he will work as a chancellor fellow overseeing the collection, and helping to study and expand it. “It’s a huge relief, because I always wondered — what if something happens to me, or there’s a flood or a fire in the building?” he said. “It got so scattered that it came to the point that a real historian would have had a heart attack if they’d walked in and seen it.” Not that he’s struggling with feelings of guilt. Carroll says his part was to save the letters from oblivion, and how it’s time to hand them off to professional archivists. Carroll seems tormented by the fact that the often beautifully descriptive, passionately written letters from the front lines are just languishing unread in boxes, or even worse, about to be stacked out on the curb for recycling. He wants all of it. “The history that’s being lost every day is just incalculable,” he said. “So saving that is my priority right now.”

Given the choice of reading a dry, magisterial analysis from a scholar or a general, or of reading a pile of letters from troops in the field, he’ll opt for the latter every day. It’s more enjoyable, and you might just learn more, he said. “I genuinely believe nobody can tell these stories better than the men and women who’ve been there and experienced these episodes first-hand,” he said. “What we get from their experience is not just eyewitness first-person accounts, but their distinct personalities and voices. “That makes the wartime experience more human than reading a dry history book.” At home in Washington earlier this year, he showed off a few he’s holding onto for just a little while longer. He delicately cradled a beautifully handwritten letter he said was the first he’d obtained from Revolutionary days. On it, Continental Army officer Alexander Scammel thunders to a college friend about the necessity of freedom from British tyranny, something he predicted would require the shedding of blood. “But every man of true honor & virtue will rather contend for the honor of first spilling his blood in so glorious a cause,” Scammell wrote in 1774 — seven years before his death in the climactic siege of Yorktown proved his words weren’t just bravado. Fast-forward 230 years, and Carroll picked up a printout of a lengthy email home in 2004 from a Marine officer, David Bellon, who was revolted by the violence gripping the city of Fallujah and sensing an inevitable showdown coming. “Its siren call for extremists and criminals has only increased steadily … If there is another city in the world that contains more terrorists, I would be surprised,” he said. “For the last two years, I just don’t see a way we can succeed in Iraq without reducing this threat.” And then a note to family from a conquering American G.I. written on Hitler’s own stationery. On it, the soldier had helpfully crossed out the dictator’s name and filled in his own: “S/Sgt. Evers.” The letter itself is haunted more than it is celebratory, describing what Staff Sgt. Horace Evers had recently seen in a train car at the Dachau concentration camp: “All were just bone with a layer of skin over them. Most of the eyes were open and had an indescribable look about them.” Taken as a whole, American war letters comprise a massive, rich historical tapestry, and Carroll says he doesn’t want a single irreplaceable thread to be lost. The seed of the impulse to amass the old letters, he said, was planted by a great loss — a fire that consumed his family’s home when Carroll was a sophomore in college, leaving the family grasping for elements of the past. “It wiped out everything,” he said. “Photos, old letters, family history.” In a sense cast adrift by the fire, Carroll was mesmerized by a World War II letter shared by a distant cousin who had witnessed some key moments of the conflict in Europe, including the liberation of a concentration camp. It provided inspiration for Carroll’s first book several years later, “Letters of a Nation,” a collection of letters from different eras about a variety of themes.

 Although he had never served in the military, Carroll realized war letters in particular were infused with a sense of history and drama that few others possess, and he decided to focus on them. In 1998, he persuaded Jeanne Philips, who writes the Dear Abby advice column and is active in support of military and veterans groups, to put out a call for families to submit war letters they were willing to share. “At first we were only asking for photocopies, but  people sent us originals,” he said. “They said, ‘Hey, we’re going to throw these out otherwise.’” One of the people who responded to that Dear Abby column was Joyce Hallenbeck. Nearly 20 years earlier, she had received a letter from her husband, Dean Allen, in which the Army first lieutenant, writing from the field during an operation in Vietnam, poured out his doubts and fears about leading men into battle. “Being a good platoon leader is a lonely job,” Allen wrote. “I don’t want to really get to know anybody over here because it would be bad enough to lose a man — I damn sure don’t want to lose a friend. I haven’t even had one of my men wounded yet let alone killed but that is to much to even hope for to go like that. But as hard as I try not to get involved with my men I still can’t help liking them and getting close to a few.” It was Allen’s final letter home. Within days, he was dead from wounds suffered when he stepped on a landmine. Hallenbeck, widowed at 25, after a while moved on with her life. When she remarried a several years later, she packed away the medals and the flag that draped her dead husband’s casket when she remarried. Except for his final message, she threw away the letters Dean had sent her from Vietnam. Years later, now divorced, she saw the Dear Abby column, and something prompted her to take out the letter she had packed away long before. What had once been simply a souvenir of loss and grief now provided moving insight the husband taken from her in Vietnam. “I think I was just plain too young to even appreciate it at the time I received it,” she said. “But then after reading about Andy’s project and pulling it out and reading it again, when I was in my 50s, it struck me as, ‘Hey, this is moving. Here’s a guy who’s got to decide who’s going to go out and possibly get killed, and he’s really struggling with it.” She sent the letter to Carroll, who included it in its entirety in “War Letters,” and then she did something else — she took out her dead husband’s military honors and put them on display in her house. “It would have stayed in my chest until I died,” she said. But because of Carroll’s war letters project, “Those things are now back out for all the world to see.”

 

^ This is an interesting project. It is part of our history and like Carroll said it shows the true feelings of what was going on when we were at war. ^

http://ww2.stripes.com/edit/warletters/#.U2XfY_HD-M8