Dispatches From the Trenches

Sometimes I pretend we are just sitting there with our arms around each other, our hearts beating as one.

From “War Letters” on PBS

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Soldier biographers have always been our truest voices of war, whether expressing their feelings and insights from the muddy, rain-soaked trenches of the Somme or the snowy foxholes of Bastogne or the steamy jungles of Vietnam.

Perhaps such correspondence ultimately will fill gaping public-knowledge gaps in the present infant war against terrorism that has U.S. bombs blasting Afghanistan in an effort to topple the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

For the moment, we have Sunday night’s “War Letters” and its metaphors linking all conflicts among nations.

Although the Military Postal History Society says U.S. mail from the front was heavily censored from the Civil War through World War II, letters featured in this memorable “American Experience” documentary on PBS are the unmistakable signature of combat, as haunting as “Taps,” joyous and anguished observations uniting soldiers across centuries as if they were companions in arms and death.

As are recollections from surviving World War II veterans in “We Stand Alone Together,” Sunday’s HBO documentary capping “Band of Brothers,” its wonderful miniseries about the men of Easy Company.

There have been other books of war mail, notably “Last Letters From Stalingrad,” recalling the doomed German Sixth Army in World War II, and “Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam,” whose HBO version in 1988 evoked a poignant reality transcending impersonal body counts and testimonies from generals and politicians.

The ache is as strong, the aria of death as loud, the prism as sharp and clear in this new, unnarrated Veterans Day program drawn from the Andrew Carroll book “War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence From American Wars.”

Extraordinary, indeed, “War Letters” roams from the Revolutionary War to the Gulf War, with producer Robert Kenner having actors read these expressive letters accompanied by period music, news footage, home video, snapshots and reenactments. Heartwarming and heartbreaking, stunning in its simplicity, this rainbow of riches humanizes the Willies and Joes of Bill Mauldin’s World War II cartoons along with those of other generations.

The candor is striking. Are similar thoughts already in the heads of U.S. units now in Afghanistan or taking part in bombing missions there? It’s a bit early.

“What sweet felicities have I left at home?” someone writes in 1777. “A pox on my bad luck.” And from the thick muck and darkness of World War I’s western front: “God knows where the sun has gone.”

Each letter carries the distinctive idiom of the period in which it was written. “Dearest girlie,” begins another World War I letter that ends: “Heaps of love for you, wifie, dear.”

“The past week was one continuous high,” a Vietnam soldier relates about his opium binge in Saigon.

There is humor here, as in a World War II trainee at Ft. Benning, Ga., urging his mother to send him no more underwear, socks, candy or Milk of Magnesia: “I am having no more bowel trouble.”

More prevalent is grim irony, for we have knowledge about the authors that they didn’t have when they composed these letters.

“Dear Mitchell,” Pvt. Paul Curtis writes his younger brother from Anzio, Italy, in 1944. “I don’t think any man can exactly explain combat. Take a combination of fear, anger, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, disgust, loneliness, homesickness, and wrap that up in one reaction and you might approach the feelings a fellow has.”

On the screen as his words are read is a prewar photo of a happy Curtis, his life surely ahead of him. Except that he died in action three days after posting this letter.

Another World War II soldier, Lt. Jack Emery, writes his fiancee with wonder about seeing “white clouds and dark shadows moving in the night.” Before Jack’s letter reached Audrey Taylor, he was dead. As was Pvt. Timothy C. Robinson, five days after writing this from Vietnam: “I hope God will bring me back home so that I may marry the girl I love....”

Also writing from Vietnam, a 19-year-old Marine angrily wonders why his buddy had to die “in a damn country not worthy fighting for.” Eight months later, he, too, was cut down.

Thoughts surfacing here are at times as raw and ugly as the violence yielding them, as in a Pearl Harbor survivor calling Japanese “damn slant eyes.”

But expect golden eloquence, too. Writing in 1862, famed nurse Clara Barton (who would later found the American Red Cross), informs a cousin that “acres of little shelter tents are dark and still as death. As I gazed sorrowfully upon them, I thought I could almost hear the slow flap of the grim messenger’s wings, as one by one he sought and selected his victims for the morning sacrifice.”

God and faith come up often, and a 1918 solder asks his church pastor: “How can there be fairness in one man being maimed for life, suffering agonies, another killed instantaneously, while I get out of it safe? Does God really love us individually or does He love his purpose more?”

Especially notable are historical signposts, as in a Japanese American soldier boasting near the end of World War II about fighting for the cause of “freedom,” the same freedom denied thousands of innocent Japanese Americans who had been interned in special camps by their fellow citizens.

Also comes this bitter 1944 letter to Yank magazine from a Brooklynite African American soldier bitterly comparing the segregated lunchrooms he encountered while training in the South with the better treatment given German POWs: “Are we not American soldiers, sworn to fight for and die if need be for this, our country? Then why are they treated better than we are?”

From the defining experience of Vietnam, finally, comes a deep and devastating lament, with veteran Richard Luttrell writing the enemy soldier he killed on a trail in Vietnam after the man had not taken the opportunity to shoot Luttrell. “Forgive me for taking your life, I was reacting just the way I was trained,” he says in the postwar letter he has placed at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Themes connecting “War Letters” and “We Stand Alone Together” are comradeship and loss. The last thing we see in the latter program from HBO is a rolling list of Easy Company young men who died in World War II. “A whole life unlived,” a veteran notes emotionally about one of his fallen pals.

And a reminder that, win or lose, war represents humankind’s ultimate failure.

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“The American Experience’s” “War Letters” will air Sunday night at 9 on KCET. The network has rated it TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children, with a special advisory for coarse language).The final episode of HBO’s “Band of Brothers” airs Sunday night at 9. The network has rated it TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.