Written in the Shadow of Death

From the Chorwon Valley, Korea, 1952, a soldier writes: “I’m coming home! It’s official as of this morning. It will be sometime before I crash in your door, a few weeks maybe, but I’m coming home. That little house is going to look like a palace to me….” He has spent 12 months there, he tells his family, “the longest 30 years of my life.” There are all kinds of wounds soldiers carry, he lets them know—there are the nightmares, the ghosts in the head. “You’ll need lots of patience with me. Patience and understanding. See you soon, see you soon, see you soon. Junior” Nothing in this letter, not its touch of dark memory or realization of troubles ahead, dims the triumphant force of that last line—a coda of joy and thanksgiving. Nor is there, in this impeccably dramatized and wrenching collection of letters from American war fronts—the Revolutionary War included—any theme more pervasive than the craving for home and family. That longing is shared by all, sometimes openly, sometimes indirectly—as, for instance, in dreams.

“Dear Pa and Ma,” another American in Korea writes in 1951. “I had a dream last night.” He’d been sitting in the kitchen at home while his mother baked. “Mom pulled some beautiful rolls out of the oven. When I woke up I had a hunk of snow and was chewing on it.” A U.S. infantryman, slogging through the cold and endless snow of Western Europe, 1945, recalls the glory of long days spent playing in the snow with childhood pals. “When our feet got cold we called it a day.” There is a lot of snow in Western Europe, he writes—and it’s beautiful. “But the Flexible Flyers have turned into tanks, and the snowballs are grenades…and when your feet get cold there’s no place to go to.…” The documentary, based on Andrew Carroll’s “War Letters,” first aired in 2001, which is why the conflicts in question end with the first Gulf War, about whose high-tech combat one soldier reflects with a sense of wonderment. “Dear Y’all,” he writes from Saudi Arabia in March 1991: “It never seemed like a war. More like a field problem, even when stuff was burning all around you. More like a curiosity than anything else.…” In no previous American war had battle ever seemed less than real. It was an appallingly intimate experience, as the film’s grimly eloquent footage and stills make clear. Here are hollow-eyed combatants on duty in Civil War encampments, in the trenches of World War I, on all the battlefronts of World War II, then Korea and Vietnam—all aware of what war is. One underage soldier, who had evidently lied his way into the service, begs his mother to “tell them” his real age and “get me out of here.” One of the distinctions of this film’s choice of letters lies in its suggestion of the differences in each war’s status. There is no missing the contrast between the sorrowful reverence of the Civil War soldier, mourning the state of “our once happy beloved country” now in a war pitting brother against brother, and the bitterness and desperation of the Vietnam-era letters here. “Dear Mom—My buddies are all dead,” one Vietnam War infantryman writes. Out of his company, 21 were killed, 29 wounded. He is among the 27 left. Men are killed, but people back home are told only half the number. “I can’t sleep good anywhere now. Ma, I’m sick of it.” Another letter writer in Vietnam—an officer—informs his wife: “Hard as I try not to get involved with my men I still can’t help liking them and getting close to a few…. Maybe someday I’ll tell you how scared I am.”

Fear and misery are to be found, of course, in the letters from World War II, but also a tone of hope and of a common enterprise. In the letter of a Japanese-American soldier, deeply moved by the joy of the Europeans he and his fellow Americans liberated, there is pride and triumph. And the knowledge, he writes, that the cause for which he fought had meaning. In this war, too, the winners would not be rushing to shake hands with the losers, as one World War I vet describes doing as soon as the armistice was official—the Germans had come over with wine, and there was much celebration. The peace that came a second time was with an incomprehensible enemy—a point a stunned U.S. soldier makes in a letter home after seeing the Dachau concentration camp. There are, in this profoundly telling work, several moments best described as unbearable. Some of the most striking of these letters—voices full of life and wit and that passion for home—were the last their writers would ever send. This would be the weekend to hear them.

Letters From War

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