Andrew calendar Andrew Carroll works with war correspondents, he talked about world war i as described by general John Pershing, commander of us forces in the conflict. From the National World war i museum in kansas city, this is an hour. [inaudible conversations] good evening, everyone, good evening, thank you, rainy day books and the National World war i museum and memorial are pleased to welcome Andrew Carroll, editor of several New York Times bestsellers including war letters, letters of the nation and behind the lines, andrew also edited on a pro bono basis operation homecoming, iraq, afghanistan and the homefront, and words of us troops and their families inspiring the Emmy Awardwinning film of the same name. In 1998 andrew started the legacy products, and initiative that honors veterans and activeduty troops by preserving their wartime correspondence and travel to all 50 states in 40 countries including iraq and afghanistan and collected an estimated 100,000 previously unpublished letters and emails, free of charge to Chapman University which is where rogers and my son went to school. The legacy project has been renamed the center for american war letters and is now part of Chapman University. Andrew served as the centers director, andrew is currently embarking on the Million Letters Campaign to seek out and preserve at least 1 million war related correspondences from every conflict in us history. Andrew will talk about the Million Letters Campaign tonight as well as his new book my fellow soldiers general John Pershing and the americans who helped win the great war. Andrew was also featured in the new Television Film on world war i of the great war, broadcast throughout the country in spring and summer on pbs. Latest gentlemen, Andrew Carroll. [applause] thank you also much for coming out on this beautiful night. Really appreciate it and so grateful to one of the great independent bookstores in this country and laura for her participation, i have come to this museum many times as a sightseer and visitor, researcher and always love coming back and it is a real honor to come back in this role. I will give you some behind the scenes story about it and the creation of the book and so forth. I want to talk about the war Letters Campaign because it is integral to the revocation of the book and i want to show you some extremely rare and i think in some cases breathtaking original war letters from Chapman University. I also love the discussion part of these events so feel free to ask questions and if anyone wants to talk afterwards, if you are considering sharing i would love to discuss that with you. As Vivien Jennings noted, i had the opportunity to travel the United States and goes countries around the world in search of wartime correspondence and one of the most surreal and meaningful conversations i had was in baghdad. I was just about to leave and waiting for military exports to take me to the airport and i saw these young iraqi men standing 15 feet away from me. They were in their 20s, i really wanted to talk to them. I had been to iraq and spend my time with the us military which was an incredible experience but i wanted to talk to actual iraqis about the war and their culture and history and so forth but i was hesitant about walking up to a group of iraqis and i finally decided i will never have this opportunity again so i tentatively went over, introduced myself but i was a writer looking for war letters and i was curious if i could talk with them. They looked at me and then each other, total silence and one of the young men whose name i later found out was omar looked like he was about to Say Something and then held back and i said please, ask me anything you once, he looks at me, breaks in a big smile and says who are your favorite reddish authors . There is a war going on around us and this is the question he wanted to know. I thought you are a writer, this is a slamdunk so i stood for a moment, started thinking and not one name came to mind and little beads of sweat started forming on my 4 head because i felt i was representing the entire American Educational system. I finally got to the point forget favorite british office, just name any british author and i stood there and was also thunderstruck by the question that i could not give a single name. The iraqis to be helpful started throwing out suggestions, wordsworth, dickens, longfellow. After a painfully long period of time i finally came up with the name all by myself which was shakespeare and as awkward as the moment was it helped break the ice. And we had this fascinating conversation about what was going on. My escort arrived and i had to go to the airport. 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. We all sort of took for granted that it had sentimental value and there was historical importance but i had never been asked what is it about these correspondences and omar told me his brother had served in the first gulf war and wrote home and hated Saddam Hussein but he couldnt say that in his letters and i asked did you save the correspondence, he said no, we burned them all. That stayed with me, that question of what is it about correspondences and one of the ironies of this project is i have no military connections, never served, no one in my family ever served and to be perfectly blunt i didnt even like history growing up. To me it was just as tedious memorization of dates, names and places and so forth 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 gone forever. Soon after the fire we got a call from a distant cousin who had served in the military, world war ii veteran, along with another veteran named irwin lauder and he wanted to check in and see how we were doing come all our memorabilia, irreplaceable family items are gone. He said it makes me think i was going through my old world war ii box and i came across a letter i wrote to my wife, he ended up sending me a copy of it and i will never forget, this is the original, three pages wrong long, april 24, 1945, i saw something that makes me realize why we are over here fighting this war. He goes into graphic detail about walking through the nazi concentration camp of buchenwald which had just been liberated because it gets very graphic, i will never forget holding this onion skin paper correspondence in my hand 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 said this is unbelievable and i will of course return it to you, he said you know what . Just keep it but i was probably going to throw it out anyway. Soon after that experience i was talking with a woman who has become a dear friend and telling her the story and she said my grandfather just read a letter at his 53rd wedding anniversary had written during world war ii and he became part of lost battalion and he wrote this before they were surrounded by germans. They were saved by the 442nd regimental combat team, something i knew nothing about. This is how it began. Talking with veterans and families, i reached out to dear abby because she has and continues to write a lot about veterans, military, support of our military community and i said i want to encourage americans to go through their attics, basements or closets, see what they have and preserve them because we are losing them to neglect and i rented out a po box, wrote a letter saying can we start this project . She went back, lets do this. This was way back in 1998, the floodgates opened, thousands of letters, i got a call from the post office, they said this is andrew carol, you need to pick up your mail. And will be there in 30 seconds, bring a car or a van. There were bins and bins of letters coming in, the very first day. The tip of the iceberg. I will never forget sitting in my car going through these letters, i wasnt expecting that. I got the messages from veterans saying why they were sending in the letters and one woman sent the original letters from vietnam that her brother had written, that was the background and she said my brother is gone, missing and 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 walked out the front door of the house and we have not found him since. And she ended with a sense time and time again, someone to remember who he was. What was important about the cover letters is they gave context to letters that were not merely apparent and this was not the two trejo, begins dear mom and dad, here i am from the philippines in 1944, the middle part of the letter is gone. I hope so too. Love bill, ps, they might censor this letter. I had seen letters with the name of the ship cut out, and islands, some little bit of detail, this is like he gave away the whole pacific campaign. From his brother ernie who sent it in, what i learned, take a piece of paper, he did this time and time again, the last line, he would cut out the middle, blame the sensors, because he hated writing letters home and this was easier. For the servicemembers who decided to write some, the history they were witness to was extraordinary. This is one of the letters received, it is 9 05 sunday morning, we have been bombed for an hour, antiaircraft guns yammering away, he was trapped in the forward engine room with his ship, could hear men screaming over the intercom of people rushing through their gas masks, look at the upper righthand corner, these are the seventh 1941, uss new orleans, pearl harbor. He is right there in the eye of the storm describing what it is like was because he was trapped in the internet there was nowhere for him to go. He wrote a 50 page letter which he could not send originally, he held onto it and thankfully survived which is how we have the letter. Because we get letters, no emails, different generations, you see those echoes over time, people have similar experiences. One of the most powerful letters we received, 14 pages handwritten by a young woman, anna miller who was witness to one of the most horrific days in American History and she is off to safety, not writing it like world war ii, but soon after it happened and writing a letter to her parents and narrating almost a short story and begins in a business meeting not unlike circumstance and shes describing this in the first person, this massive boom outside, everybody stops and there is probably construction from the building next door, sitting there and suddenly it is getting louder, p people screaming, i dont mean to be rude but can we see what is going on . We walked to large bay windows, in the second plane hitting the world trade center, they are in the marriott right next door so she goes on to describe in vivid detail rushing towards the exit, they are told to evacuate the building, Security Guard blocking the way is just as in like he has seen a ghost. We have got to get out, we are told to evacuate the buildings, you cannot go out there, you cannot see what is out there and they convince them they are told by the police to get out of the building and he says to them i want you to run as fast as you can, do not look at what is in the streets which was impossible for them not to do and she goes into detail about what they saw and how she was caught up in smoke, debris, when the buildings fell, and almost died. One little comment i would like to add, this is hard to see but we are meant to be a meticulous with the letters we received, kept in pristine condition and i noticed we too little stains on them. I hope we didnt do anything to this, i called and said i have to be up front, i noticed these two water stains. Where though there before . She said yes, those are my tears, i was crying when i wrote this. People assume, going back to the first and Second World War because of censorship the letters cant or dont say anything. The pearl harbor letters demonstrate they got around censorship but some letters, there is an unsuspecting message. This letter was written april 29, 1945, that is the letterhead, he begins my beloved, another sunday, wondering how many more days you would like this, mainly im worried about you and aunt bertha. Pretty common expression of affection and worry. Then we got a code chief. When i start a letter, my beloved, as he does here, look for codenames of its oracles. There were no its oracles. On this side are all the fictitious names which and ruth, saipan, perl, but, philippine, he goes on the list. In a way the letter was saying much more than it let on especially to the sensors. What was extraordinary about the letter, the paper itself reveals the circumstances under which these troops were living. We have letters from desert storm and Operation Iraqi freedom that are coated in sand because they were written in the letter, letters from the civil war that have splotches of mud and blood on them, letters from korea that the ink is stained because it was written during a snowstorm but the most dynamic is from world war ii. This by a soldier writing to a friend about a close call where a shell dropped next to him and didnt explode so he is telling his friend about his close call, put the letter in his rucksack, gets shot in the back, survives, but this is the bullet hole right through the letter. Those are the singe marks. He did survive. One of the things, in many ways letter writing is the most egalitarian artform there is. The pencil and piece of paper, you dont do anything else, just one of the most powerful letters i came across was by a slave who escaped freedom, joined the union army and he found out his regiment by sheer coincidence was bearing down on the plantation he had been held at the slave and his daughter was still held in bondage. As they approached in 1864, i received a letter from caroline telling me i tried to steal my child away from you. I want you to understand mary is my child and she is godgiven right my own. We are making up one black troops and when we come, we dont expect to leave brute or branch. I offered once to pay you 40 for my own child, im glad you did not accept it. You hold on as long as you can. When i came after mary i will have the power and authority to bring her away and execute vengeance on those who hold my child. You will then know how to speak to me. Spotswood rice. Not all the correspondence we get our solemn or serious, theres a lot of levity laced through these correspondences. One of my favorites is by an Army Sergeant named sharon allen, serving iraq. She roast home an email about a campfire singalong with a group of kurdish soldiers who misinterpreted a famous beatles song we think has to do with finding peace and serenity in the world and they thought was a little green vegetable. I am not going to sing this but i will give you a sense what happened. This is sharon writing home to her family. July 2004, turks and iraqis and kurds, kurds love us. And try to join in. And a lot of kurdish soldiers complete with ak47s, and the beatles, let it be. When i find myself in times of trouble, mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom. Little p, whisper words of wisdom, little p. That was a good day. Not all the letters, and one of the letters is from korea, and on his way back home. It is official as of this morning, sometime before i crash in your door, a few weeks maybe but im coming home. Looking forward to seeing you again but in no hurry to see her expression when you see me. The longest 30 years of my life. And a cup of hot coffee. And hooks for hands and break our backs, what about the wounds you cant see, and tell you now you need a lot of patience with me, patience and understanding. See you soon, see you soon, see you soon. And we see how war affects those who served and those on the home front. The correspondence by myrna whose son charles was caught in an ambush in iraq, lost his leg, very athletic young man and this was a grave injury. She lived near walter reed hospital. She sent this email journal to other members of the family. I brought charles home from walter reed, everything had gone to the wash and dry cycle, dumped a freshly wanted close onto the bed to fold them. It was late and i was quite weary so i wanted to get to bed and try for a better nights sleep than i had been having before. I found one stock, just one. I pulled on the rest of the clothes and still just the one stock. I went back to the laundry room, nothing was there. I looked between the washer and dryer and all around the floor in case i dropped the other stock during loading and unloading process. Still my tired and preoccupied mind didnt get it. As i walked back to the bedroom with one stock in hand it hit me like a punch, there was no other stock. There was no other foot, lower leg or knee. I stood in my bedroom clutching that one stock and an involuntary moan came from my throat but it originated in my heart. This was an email. I cant emphasize enough that we talk about this project, i really do include emails. There is Something Dynamic and important about handwritten letter and when i was in iraq i saw a young soldier standing in front of a video camera and i asked him i dont mean to interrupt you, this is not the original. It is just a facsimile of it. I ask what he is doing . Burning a dvd letter to my mom, just like this. This dvd will probably obsolete within 10 to 15 years just as we dont use vhs tapes which many vietnam troops did, sending home audio recordings. This letter which i am not going to drop is from the american revolution. This is the oldest letter we have and one of the oldest war letters in existence. It is as pristine as the day it was written in mdcclxxv. Moving on to general purging and world war i, like many americans, survey after survey has shown i was not particularly interested in this conflict even after i started the war letters project. After we moved out of the house that burned down we moved into another part of washington dc by american university. As it turned out, a you working on world war i to create the most lethal gas ever constructed