This weekend I read Andrew Carroll's Grace Under Fire: Letters of Faith in Times of War (New York: Doubleday, 2007). Over the past nine years Carroll has assembled an archive of letters (or e-mails) written by U.S. soldiers involved in any combat operation from the American Revolution to the present day. The letters in the present collection were selected because they deal with issues of spirituality, religion, and theodicy. There are two letters written by brothers fighting on opposing sides of the Civil War, letters by chaplains, letters that attest to strengthened faith and letters that address the question of God's presence or absence in the face of the unspeakable suffering of wartime. I give it a high recommendation, especially as food for thought as we think about the disastrous tragedy of this present war in Iraq. These letters help us get inside the lives and thoughts of some of the participants in war. Several of the letters in this book are available online through Random House.
Carroll heads up the Legacy Project, which collects and preserves wartime letters. While there is no complete online digitization project for the archive, there are a number of web sites which exhibit letters from the project:In partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Insitute of American History, the Legacy Project is exhibiting letters and audio recordings of the correspondences .
PBS produced a critically-acclaimed documentary titled "War Letters," based on Andrew Carroll's national bestseller of the same name, and letters featured in that program can be seen by clicking the link that says "Featured Letters." PBS also provides a brief bibliography related to wartime letters.
History Channel also produced a documentary, "Dear Home," based on World War II letters in the Legacy Project's collection, and has made some of these letters available.
Carroll has edited several previous collections of letters in book format, among them are:
War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (New York: Scribner, repr. 2002)
Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters -- and One Man's Search to Find Them (New York: Scribner, 2005)
