‘War Letters’ author makes campus stop

Best-selling author Andrew Carroll will offer remarks and sign books during a special presentation at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 29 at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Carroll’s book, “War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars,” explores the love, passion, pain, horror and hope of the men and women who fought and those who remained at home in combats from the Civil War up to the Gulf War. The book is also the subject of the documentary American Experience “War Letters” that will air on Wisconsin Public Television at 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 2.

“War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars” includes four letters from Wisconsin Vietnam veterans. At the event, archivists from the Wisconsin Historical Society will assemble a display of those letters and photos of their writers for viewing prior to Carroll’s talk.

In late 1989, Carroll’s childhood home burned down. That experience made him realize the implications of a loss of personal correspondence. He had a collection of letters from a friend in Beijing during the crackdown at Tiananmen Square.

In Carroll, that began the stirrings of what he would call the Legacy Project. He began telling others about his appreciation for old correspondence and friends and relatives forwarded him copies of letters that had deeply affected them.

Remarkably, they were all war letters. Some dated back to the Civil War. All of them transcended the physical aspects of battle; they were about passion, perseverance, honor and courage. And, they demonstrated that there must be many more letters tucked away in people’s lives.

On a whim, Carroll decided to write newspaper columnist Abigail Van Buren to see if she would consider soliciting more letters for his Legacy Project. She did, in her column of Veterans Day 1998.

Three days later, Carroll’s post office box was overflowing with 50,000 never-before-seen war letters. There were handwritten letters from the American Revolution to typed e-mails from the Balkans. Every military conflict of American history was represented. Here were eyewitness accounts of Gettysburg and Shiloh, St. Mihiel and Argonne-Meuse, Pearl Harbor and D-Day, the Tet Offensive, Desert Storm and the firefight in Somalia.

Carroll recognizes that younger generations may not understand the sacrifices made by war veterans: “It’s important to remember the graphic nature of war, and I think nothing strips away the glamour and the romance more than these letters.”

For more information about the Wisconsin Historical Society program, call (608) 264-6586.