"Sometimes I really wonder how I will make it"

By Douglas Brinkley

One night in April 1944, just weeks before D-Day, like all lonely servicemen, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower was writing a letter home. "How I wish this cruel business of war could be completed quickly," he wrote to his wife Mamie. "Entirely aside from longing to return to you (and stay there) it is a terribly sad business to total up the casualties each day--even in an air war--and to realize how many youngsters are gone forever. A man must develop a veneer of callousness that lets him consider such things dispassionately, but he can never escape a recognition of the fact that back home the news brings anguish and suffering to families all over the country...War demands real toughness of fiber--not only in the soldiers [who] must endure, but in the homes that must sacrifice their best."

Made of pretty tough fiber himself, Eisenhower would note later that the hardest part of his job in World War II came on Sundays, which he set aside for the mournful chore of signing thousands of condolence letters to the families of G.I.s killed in the European theater. (It was a chore we'll be reminded of again next month, when the National D-Day Museum opens in New Orleans.) To soothe the pain of the bureaucratic task of signing these starkly official government letters--casualty certificates, really--Ike turned to the classics of war poetry, from Homer to Siegfried Sassoon.

Eisenhower understood that however gripping the battle histories, nothing captures the heartrending pity of war the way good poetry can, particularly that written in trenches and foxholes amid the horrors of combat. It is one thing to read in a textbook that more than 116,000 U.S. soldiers died in World War I; it's quite another to be struck by the question British poet Wilfred Owen raised in his Anthem for Doomed Young: "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?/Only the monstrous anger of the guns./Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle/Can patter out their hasty orisons." But Owen never learned that he had penned some of the most celebrated verse to come out of World War I: he was killed in action on the Western Front a week before the Armistice. A similar fate met Alan Seeger, an American who joined the French Foreign Legion when the war broke out and was killed in France fighting Germans in 1916--shortly after writing his poem I Have a Rendezvous with Death. The verse begins, "I have a rendezvous with Death/At some disputed barricade" and ends, "And I to my pledged word am true./I shall not fail that rendezvous." Seeger's poem inspired Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous line "This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny" and was later adopted by President John F. Kennedy when insisting that the U.S. would soon put a man on the moon.

The letters published here for Memorial Day evoke the same emotion in a plainer poetry of their own. Dating from World War I through the Vietnam conflict, they are the last letters the soldier-authors are known to have written, living testimonials from ordinary men who only suspected they were about to die. There is no vainglory of war in these missives, just the eternal mystery of man's preference for the call to arms over the Golden Rule. These epistles haunt the soul the same way the best war poems do--perhaps even more poignantly, because we know what their authors didn't: that in Owen's memorable line, their eyes would very soon "shine the holy glimmers of good-byes."

Although unintentionally so, these are farewell letters to the loved ones who received them, proud but painful reminders of lost youth and patriotic sacrifice. Selected from more than 50,000 wartime letters collected by Andrew Carroll's Legacy Project, a nonprofit initiative that seeks out historically significant wartime letters written by Americans from all walks of life (a larger selection edited by Carroll will be published as a book next May by Scribner's), the correspondence included here suggests a larger historical pattern: soldiers enlisted in the two World Wars are generally upbeat and optimistic, brimming with good-natured confidence. By contrast the G.I.s of the cold war, fighting in Korea and Vietnam, write letters of doubt and confusion, unsure whether dying in a Chosin Reservoir crater or Mekong Delta rice paddy for Old Glory made practical sense. Fear of death, however, permeates them all, no matter in which bloodstained decade they were composed.

But it would be a disservice to their authors to dwell only on the sad finality of these letters full of playful language and good cheer, even under the most harrowing circumstances. After all, most were responses written in the glow of morale boosted by receiving news from home that life was still normal there, that Dad was still priding himself on the tomatoes bursting ripe in the vegetable garden, that Little Brother had just smacked his first stand-up double or that Sis had been accepted at the local university. The mundane details of life in the U.S.--the score of Friday night's football game, the pattern of a soft cotton dress bought special on Main Street--have always been the rare joy of American soldiers far from home. For every Dear John letter serving notice that a soldier had been dumped by his best girl, a thousand others served warm reminders of Mom's cooking for a holiday picnic under the oak tree in the backyard. And it was in this home-and-hearth spirit that the doughboys, G.I.s and grunts wrote back.

It's important too to remember the restrictions on servicemen's correspondence. Whereas in the Civil War soldiers could wax poetic in detailed epistles about the topography around battlefields, the long rock gullies of the Maryland countryside or the paltry food rations at Vicksburg, 20th century U.S. troops were censored from describing their surroundings for fear of tipping off the enemy to military movements. As a result their letters home are far more personal, more expressive of the gripping fears and hopeful longings of young men with no illusions left. Each one of these introspective letters sounds the distant and disturbing echo of a lone bugle blowing taps.

Brinkley is professor of history and director of the Eisenhower Center of American Studies at the University of New Orleans

Photocopies or typed transcripts of letters from any of America's wars, on any subject, may be sent to the Legacy Project, Attn.: Andrew Carroll, Box 53250, Washington, D.C. 20009 (Include phone no.)