The Words of War

In a Washington, D.C., apartment he keeps as an office, Andrew Carroll is knee-deep in a flood of war letters--75,000 of them. As part of his Legacy Project--a program he started in 1998 to encourage Americans to find and preserve their war correspondence--Carroll spends most of his waking moments reading and archiving these snapshot histories. He senses their cultural significance in a way that few do in this age of satellite phones and electronic mail from the front lines.

“I talk to a lot of troops today who delete their e-mails when they come back, or their spouses delete them after they come in,” says Carroll. “In a couple of generations their kids are going to want to look back on these letters and they’re all going to be gone.”

Though he has devoted the last seven of his 35 years to this “great undiscovered literature,” Carroll knew very little about war correspondence--or history for that matter--before starting the Legacy Project. But he always knew the importance and power of letters, as well as the pain of losing them. In December 1989, while studying for finals at Columbia University, Carroll received news that his family home in Georgetown--as well as hundreds of his letters from family and friends--had burned in an electrical fire.

While assembling a chapter of war correspondence for his 1997 New York Times bestseller “Letters of a Nation,” which was a general collection of correspondence throughout American history, Carroll spoke to many World War II veterans who had long ago discarded their wartime letters. As a result, he dashed off a plea to “Dear Abby” columnist Jeanne Phillips, detailing the aims of his proposed Legacy Project. Phillips, a fan of Carroll’s book, featured the project in her column. Within days, Carroll was buried in war letters.

But why, might you ask, would living veterans, and the relatives of those killed in battle, hand over their most personal missives to a stranger? “If you were to call and ask a dozen people why they did it, I bet you’d get a dozen different answers,” says Phillips. “The reasons differ with the people who participate. They want their loved one to be remembered, they want that effort to be remembered. It’s a way of keeping that person alive.”

The public response was invigorating, but nothing could have prepared Carroll for the impact--emotional and spiritual--that reading those letters would have on his personal life. “It’s one thing to think about war in the abstract; it’s entirely different to see the details of it,” says Carroll, who lost sleep after delving into these potent missives. “I thought that I could read them almost clinically.”

Yet he soldiered on through the rawness of frontline humor and battle atrocities, long-lost loves and Dear Johns. He read 50,000 pieces of correspondence in about a year, and in 2001 Scribner published 200 of the most poignant pieces in a book titled “War Letters.” It went on to sell 300,000 copies and spawned a PBS documentary of the same name. Although “War Letters” painted a slightly shaded picture of war--it included only letters from American soldiers--his latest book, “Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters--and One Man’s Search to Find Them,” is a collection of 200 wartime letters from around the world.

Though reading war correspondence may not be the best we can do in times of war, it is perhaps the least we can do. And if Carroll was going to ask people around the world for their letters, he at least wanted to meet them. To get a clearer idea of what war does to its participants, Carroll embarked on a seven-month world tour, meeting with veterans and historians in 35 countries, in war-torn cities such as Sarajevo and Hiroshima, Baghdad and Kabul. “In Vietnam it was really hot, and I’m carrying a water bottle and camera and I’m exhausted,” Carroll says. “These guys [American troops] were humping through the jungle with 80-pound packs and hadn’t slept for two days. It gave me an even greater appreciation of the physical conditions these men and women go through.”

Norma Kipp Avendano entrusted Carroll with 10 letters, several of which appear in “Behind the Lines.” “I’m amazed that a man so young has such a passion for our military men and women,” says the 77-year-old San Diego resident, who understands the power of letters better than most. She married a Marine she’d never met after corresponding with him for 22 months during World War II. She hopes Carroll’s new book helps convince every man and woman in uniform that they’re fighting for a nation that cares.

“It’s not just when the peace treaties are signed or when they come home that war is over. It lingers,” Carroll says. “With these books I want to show the full spectrum of this experience and what it does to individuals, what it does to families and what it does to nations.”

Historians and journalists sometimes report the broad truths of battle while overlooking the finer realities. This is where Carroll’s lack of training--as a historian or military specialist--and his desire that “the letters speak for themselves” has worked to his advantage. The National Endowment for the Arts and its chairman, Dana Gioia, chose Carroll to edit the forthcoming anthology from the NEA’s “Operation Homecoming” program, which is collecting war-inspired letters, fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs and journal writing from service members and their families. He did so because Carroll’s books “have an authentic literary quality as well as historical importance, and that’s hard to do.”

Carroll will edit the Operation Homecoming anthology gratis. But generosity is nothing new for Carroll, who has given about $400,000 from the sales of “War Letters” to veterans groups and other related nonprofits, and plans on donating all the royalties from “Behind the Lines.” “I’m not a slave to fashion,” he says, blissfully ignoring the hole in his chinos. “I’m not looking to have an extravagant life.... I love what I do.”

Happy or not, Carroll is suffering separation anxiety. He announced last Tuesday at the start of his 50-state Legacy Project and “Behind the Lines” tour that he is donating his entire collection--all 75,000 letters--to New York’s Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. “It’s going to seem really empty in here when all of these are gone,” says Carroll, who concedes that “Behind the Lines” might be his last book of war letters. “But the Legacy Project is still going on, and I still want to read these letters.”

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Andrew Carroll and others will read letters and share stories from Carroll’s book, “Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters--and One Man’s Search to Find Them” (Scribner), at 7 p.m. on Thursday at the Museum of Tolerance, 9786 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles. Reservations are required; call (310) 772-2527. Free. Information about Carroll’s Legacy Project is available at www.warletters.com