December 3, 2003
Andy Carroll, founder and director of the Legacy Project, chats about the literary and historic value of soldiers’ letters home with Spc. John Sainato, a heavy equipment transporter, or HET, driver for the 11th Transportation Company. (from Army Images)

Besides the NEA’s Operation Homecoming and the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s online exhibition, there are other accessible online archives of war letters. Andrew Carroll, editor of War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars and, more recently, Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters and One Man’s Search to Find Them, has been running the Legacy Project since 1998 - "a national, all-volunteer effort that encourages Americans to honor and remember those who have served—or are currently serving—this nation in wartime by seeking out and preserving their letters and e-mails home." PBS produced a documentary, "War Letters," based on Carroll’s book, as did the History Channel, though "Dear Home" was based exclusively on the Legacy Project’s WWII letters. The writing collected through the NEA’s Operation Homecoming will be released as a book, edited by Carroll, this September.

Here’s one of the letters featured on the PBS site and from Carroll’s book War Letters. It is a letter by Dan Welch, a Staff Sergeant from Maine who served in Operation Desert Storm.

March 8, 1991.
"I can’t describe it. I mean the scene on the highway. We all just looked at it in the moonlight as we drove through the now silent carnage going God damn, God damn… There was a dead Iraqi in a car, eyes wide open, frozen in a silent scream… I guess I’ve played it so much for the last ten years that it just didn’t seem much different than the training. I’ve had field problems that were tougher. The waiting and worrying before we did it were worse than doing it. …It’s only been the last couple of days that I’ve come to realize the horror that has taken place here. …And I think it’s taken so long because with only the small number of exceptions on our part, it was almost entirely theirs…"

After the war, Welch developed asthma, memory and equilibrium problems. He has since retired from the military.