[inaudible discussion] good evening, everyone. Thank you so much. Rainy day books and the National World war i Museum Museum and memorial are pleased to welcome Andrew Carroll, Andrew Carroll this editor of several New York Times best sellers including war letters, letters of na pigs and bind he lines am drown also edit an pro bono basis, homecoming which inspired the film of the same name. In 1998, andrew founded the legacy project, an allvolunteer initiative that honors veterans and active duty troop biz preserving their wartime correspondence, he has traveled to all 50 states and more than 40 country, including iraq and afghanistan and has collected today an estimated 100,000 previously unpublished letters and emails. Andrew donated the massive Collection Free of charge to chatman university which. The legacy project has been renamed the center for american war letters, and is now part of chapman university. Andrew serves as the centers director. Andrew is currently embarking on the Million Letters Campaign to seek out and preserve at least one million warrelated correspondences from every conflict in the u. S. History. Andrew will talk about the Million Letters Campaign tonight as well as this new book my fellow soldiers general ongoing pershing and the americans who helped win the great war. Andrew is featured the new Television Film on world war i, the great war, broadcast throughout the countries this spring and summer on pbs. Ladies and gentlemen, Andrew Carroll. [applause] thank you so much. Good evening. Thank you all so much for coming out on this beautiful night. I really appreciate it. Im so grateful to vivian and rainy day books, one of the great independent book stores and to laura for her participation in setting this up. Ive come to this museum, the National World war i museum as a sight seer and visitor, as a researcher and i always love coming bag here and now its a real honor to come here in this role. Ill give you some behind he scenes asks about my book and creation of the book and to forth. Do want to talk about the overall war Letters Campaign because its so integral to the creation of the book and i want to show you some extremely rare and i think in some cases breathtaking original war alerts from our archives at chapman university. I also love the discussion part of these events so please do feel free to ask questions and if theres anyone who wants to talk afterwards more personally, if you have letters or emails youre considering sharing, id love to discuss that with you. As vivian noted, in the introduction, i had the opportunity to travel the United States and to go to countries around the world in search of wartime correspondences, and one of the most surreal and also meaningful conversation is ever had was in baghdad, and i was actually just about to leave and waiting for a military escort to take me to the airport and i saw these four young iraqi men standing about 15 feet from me. They were in their 20s. Knew they spoke englishing because i could overhear their conversations and i really wanted to talk to them ahead. Gone iraq spend my time with the u. S. Military, which as incredible experience, but i wanted to talk to actual iraqi busy the war and their culture and history and to south. If was hesitant to just walk up to this group of iraqis, and i finally decided ill never have this opportunity again so i tentatively went over, introduced myself and said i was a writer traveling the world and looking for war letters and i was curious if if could talk with them. They looked at me, and then each other, and total silence. And one of the young men, whose name i later found out was amare, looked like he was about to Say Something and the end kind of held back. I said, feel free to ask me anything. He looks martinez me and breaks out in a big smile and says who are your favorite british authors . Theres a war going on around us, and this is the question that he wanted to know. So i thought, well, youre a writer. This is a slamdunk. So i stood there for a moment and taterred thinking, and not one name came to mind. And little beads of sweat started forming on my forehead because i felt like i was representing the entire American Educational system and i got to the point where i was like, forget favorite british author, just name any british author ands wail to sow thunder struck eye the question i could not think of asen ill name so the rakees started throwing out suggestions, dickens, longfellow. After a painfully long period of silence i finally came up with the name all by myself which was shakespeare, and as awkward as the moment was, it kind of helped break the ice and we had this really facinating conversation about our two nations and what had been going on. And amare said my escort arrived and i had to go but one last question. Why do you focus on letters . I was halfway around the world at this point and nobody had asked me that question. I think we all sort of took for granted they had sentimental value but i had never really been asked what is its these correspondences . And amare told me his brother had served in what was called the first gulf war, and he wrote home, and he hated hussein, hatedded the army but couldnt say that in this letters. Asked him if they saved the correspondents and he said no, burned them all. That stayed we me that question before whats it about correspondent one of the irony of the project was i have no military connection, never served, nobody in any family served and to be perfectly blunt i didnt like history growing up. To me i it was just this tedious enemy racing of dates and names and places and then something extraordinary happened. Our house in washington, dc burned to the ground, nobody was hurt, which is the most important thing, but everything we had went up in smoke. And back then when you lost your letters and your photographs they were again forever. And soon after the fire, we got a call from a distant cousin who had served in the military, world war ii veteran, james jordan who whom the book is dedicated along with another extraordinary veteran, and he just wanted to check in to see how we were doing. I said, all of ore memorabilia, irreplaceable family items are gone. And he said, just makes me think, i was going through my order world war ii box and i came across a letter i wrote to my wife issue was a young he was 23 years old at the time, p31 pilot and he ended up sending me a copy and this is the original. Three pages long, type. I says, april 21, 1945. I saw something today that makes me realize why were over here fighting his war. And he goes into graphic detail about walking through the nazi concentration camp at buchenwald, and i wont read it because its very graphic, and ill never forget just holding this thin onion skin paper correspondence in my hands and thinking how fragile it was and yet how significant the weight of the words and what he was writing about, and i called him and i said, jim, this is unbelievable, and i will of course return it to you. And he said, you know what . Just keep it. I was probably going to throw it out anyway. Soon after that experience, i was talking with a young woman who has become a dear friend, and i was telling her the story and she said my grandfather just read a letter at his 50th 50th wedding anniversary that he had written during world war 2 as well and he became part of the lost battalion and wrote a letter before they were surrounded by germans and this is not the lost battalion from world war ii and they saved by the 442 until japanese regimental combat team, a story i knew nothing about. This is hough it began. Just word of mouth, talking with vas and families. So i reached out to dear abbie because she continues to write about vas and military some support of the military community, and i said i want to encourage americans to go through the attics, basements, closets to tee set why have and preserve them because a lot of them are throwing these away. And i represented a post office box and wrote her a letter, can you wrote a column and she said, sweety, lets do this. On veterans day in 1998, this column happened in newspapers us around the country and floodgates opened. Thousands and thousands of letters were coming in and i didnt know this until i got a call from the post office, which is always a little weird when the post office calls you. They said get down here now and pick up your mail. This is just four days later if i jumped end on my bike and was there in 30 seconds and the guy kentucky expelled said you might want to bring a car or van. The were bin busy and bins of letters from all over the country and these are people who put something in the mail the first day, the tip of the iceberg, and i was sitting in hi car going through letters, it was like christmas, and what first struck me were the cover letters. I wasnt expecting that. These were the messages from the veteran order their families saying why they sent the letters. One woman wrote the original letters from vietnam her brother written and she said, my brother is gone, is missing, and then she put therron poetically but not a pow. He came back from the war but he was so traumatized by what he had seen and experienced that one day he just walked out the front door of the house and we have not been able to fine himself since and ended it with a sentence, i just want someone to remember who he was. And what was also important about the cover letters they gave context of the letters that werent immediately apparent, and this is not the only, too fragile to travel with, its a fax. It begins dear mom and dad. Here i am from the philippines, november 1944. And then the whole middle part of the letter is gone. At the bottom it says, i hope so, too. Love bill, ps, they might censor this letter. Now, i had seen letters where theres the name of a ship cut out, an aleaned. This is like he gave away the whole Pacific Campaign and from this brother earnie issue learned that bill would take a piece of paper, wright the first line at the top did this time and time gem write the last line and cut out the middle, blame the censors beau he hated writing letters home and this was just easier. Now, for the Service Members who actually decided to write something, the history that they were witness to was just extraordinary. This is one of the letters we received also from world war ii dear sis. Its now 9 05 sunday morning. We have b. Bombed for honever an your, the antiaircraft guns areamerring away him says i can hear men screaming over the intercom, people rushing for gas masks. In the upper righthand corner, december 7, 1941, uss new orleans, pearl harbor. He is right there in the eye of the storm describing what its like, and because he was trapped in the forward engine room, he wrote this 50page letter which he could not send originally and he hang on to it and thank any surveyed. We get letters and im eadess and people had similar experiences and and you see these echos. One of the most powerful letter wes received, 14 paint, hand written, by a young woman, anna miller who was also witness to one of the most horrific daves in American History and she is not writing this way the young fellow did world war ii. But its soon after it happened. Some she is writing a letter to her parents and she is narrating it almost like a short story and begins in a business meeting not unlike this circumstance with the speaker and 100 people, and they all she is again describing this the in first person. She is we hear this massive boom outside. And everybody stops and we talk amongst ourselves and we realize probably construct at a building next door because we notice it scaffolding and she said were sitting there and then suddenly we start hearing sirens and theyre getting louder and louder and we hear people screaming, and finally someone in the audience stands up and says to the speaker, im sorry to interrupt you but can we look outside . They walk over at the large bay windows with curtain on the and the moment the pull them back and see the second plane hitting the world trade center. Theyre in the mariott right next deer and she describes about rushing towards the exit, told to evacuate the build to go mariott Security Guard is blocking the way, just ash , like he has seen a ghost and she says, we have to get out. He says you cant go out there. You cannot see what is out there. And finally they convince him theyre just being told by the police to get out of the building and he says to them issue want you to run as fast as you can. And do not look at what is in the streets, which was of course impossible for them not to do and anna again goes into detail. And how she was caught up in the smoke and debris when the building saw and almost died, and theres one little comment, id like to just add, that it know this is hard to see but where obviously meticulous about the letters we received at chapman to make sure theyre kept in pristine condition and i notice these two little stains on them, little blurs and i thought, my goodness, i hope we didnt do anything to this, and i called anna and i said, i just have to be up front, i noticed these two kind of water stains. Were those there before in she said, yeah. Those are my tears because i was crying when i wrote this. People assume going back to the first and Second World War that because the censorship the alerts cant say anything, they got around censorship but theres an unsuspecting message in some letters. A letter written in april 29, 1945, camp lejeune, he was already away. And he just begins, my beloved, another sunday and we are still apart. Just wonder how much moore days like this. Mainly im worried about you and aunt ruth. Then we got the code sheet. When i start a letter, my beloved, as he does here, look for code names of aunt or uncle. There were no aunts or unclees on this side are all the fictitious names. Aunt ruth, saipan. Pearl, ewoe, bud, philippines and goes down the list. The letter was saying much more than it led on to censors. What was also to extraordinary about the letters is that the paper itself revealed the life and death circumstances under which the troops were living. Letters from desert storm and iraqi freedom coated in sand. Letters from civil war with mud and blood. Letters from korea that was written during a snow storm. And the most dynamic letter we have that shows this is also from world war ii and this is bay soldier who is writing to a friend, fellow soldier backer close call he had where a shell dropped right next to him and didnt explode. So he is till telling his friend about the close call, put thursday letter in his rucksack, out there though the back and this the bullet hole, right through the letter. He did survive. One thing i also about letters in many ways letter writing is the mose most egalitarian you dont need a stage or anything else, just a pencil and paper. And one of the most powerful letters ive come across was by a slave named spots rice who escaped prepare to freedom, joined the union army and found out that his regiment, by sheer coincidence, was bearing down on the plantation where he had been held as a slave and where his daughter was still held in bondage, september 3, 1864 he wrote a letter to his formermaster. I received a letter from caroline tell michigan you say i tried to steal my child from you. Want you to understand that mary is my child, and she is a god given right to my own. We are now make up about a thousand black troops, and when we come woe be to slave holding rebels for we dont expect to leave them root nor branch. Offered once to pay dour 40 for the own child but im glad now you did not accept so it you just hold on now as long as you can and enwhen i come after mother i will have a power and authority to bring her away and to execute vengeance on those who hold my child. You will then know how to speak to me. Spotswood rice. Not all of the correspondences we getting solemn or serious. We do have theres a lot of levity. One is bay Army Sergeant named sharon allen and she was serving in iraq and wrote home an email about it was kind of a camp fire sing along with a group after kurdish soldier whose had slightly misinterpreted a fame beatle song we think has to do with finding peace and sir rein any and she thought was agent green vegetable. This is sharon writing home to her family. July 2004. We the kurds love us. A guy brought a guitar around and played music for. The. Styes they try to join. In you havent lived until you seen a butch of kurdish soldiers complete with ak47s, sitting around and singing with gusto as they manage eled the beatles, let it be. When i find myself in times of trouble, mother mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, little pea, little pea. They really got into it. Little pea, little pea, little pea, little pea, whisper words of wisdom, little pea. That was a good day. Not all letter we have are combat situated or written in a war zone and one of most powerful letters is from korea by a young kid, i think 19 years old, and maybe even younger, and he was finally realizing he was on his way back home. And he wrote this to his family. This is just a small excerpt. Dear everybody. Im coming home. Its official as of this morning. Sometime with crash on your door, few weeks but im coming home. Im looking forward to seeing you again, but im in no hurry to see your expressions when you see me. Im spent 12 months here, the longest 30 years of my life. Time is would have traded my soul for a drink of cold water or a cup of hot coffee but im coming home now. Its almost funny, we see a guy in a wheelchair, guy in crutch, one arm, hooks hooks and be brer backs trying to help them. What about the wounds you cant see . The phantoms their nightmares, the ghosts in your head . Im going to tell you now, youll neat a lot of patience with me, patience and understanding. We all will. See you soon, see you soon, see you soon. And then we see as well how war affects those who served and those on the homefront, and again, one thief most i think poignant correspondences we came across is by a woman myrna whose son was in battle in iraq and lost his leg. A very athletic young man and it was a grave injury and so she lived near Walter Reed Hospital when it was open and would see him, and she sent this really kind of an email journal to other members of the family. I brought charles clothes home from walter reed. Everything had gone through the wash and dry cycles and i dumpled fresh he laundered clothes on to bed to fold. The it was late and i was quite wear