US author comes to RP in search of war letters

"Only the dead have seen the end of war," Plato once wrote. But there is more to war than just staring death in the face even in the midst of loneliness and violence, as American author Andrew Carroll found out.

War may be ugly and vicious, yet it is also "a time when people show great tenderness, compassion and generosity."

This, Carroll said, was what he learned in the past 15 years he spent reading thousands of letters that date back to the American Civil War up to the recent United States-led war on Iraq.

Carroll, founder and director of the 15-year-old Legacy Project, a non-profit organization that aims to initially preserve American war letters, is now expanding the initiative by looking for letters around the world to be included in the follow-up book to his bestseller "War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars."

"The (American) veterans told me that if I truly want to understand warfare, I must look at it from different perspectives," Carroll said. "I can’t look at it from American eyes only. I have to see how war is from other people’s eyes, including our enemies."

"They may not be right but at least we have to see it from their standpoint," Carroll said in an interview Monday, hours before his flight to his next destination: Vietnam, where America’s longest war took place and where an estimated 2.5 million — Vietnamese and Americans alike — were killed.

And then, there is the classic Filipino sense of humor.

Carroll, 34, was in Manila for a few days, scouring museums and libraries for letters. He now has with him a few thousand letters written by Filipinos.

At the Heritage Library in Makati City, Carroll said he found at most five different unpublished collections of war correspondence, each with 20 to 100 letters.

Among these were accounts written by a Filipino man during the Japanese occupation. Carroll later found out these accounts were actually part of the man’s diary.

Carroll lost no time in calling up the writer’s wife. "I just looked her up in the directory and we spoke about her husband’s diary. It was incredible!"

Carroll said one thing he found remarkable about Filipinos was their fine sense of humor, even in the most troubled times.

"The letters told funny stories or would even mock the Japanese," said Carroll, who is not at all alien to Filipino humor. His friend fell in love — and is set to marry — a Filipina because she was "the funniest woman he ever met."

Carroll’s search for war correspondence consists of a 35-country itinerary, which began in August 2003. His journey has taken him to Poland, Germany, Sarajevo, London, Russia, Afghanistan and Iraq, to name a few.

Carroll is now traveling around Asian countries. Aside from the Philippines and Vietnam, he will travel to China, Korea and Japan.

Carroll is also set to visit Kuwait, Egypt, Malta, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Scotland.

"I am developing admiration for those who lived through these times. These are extraordinary stories and I would like to take these stories back so that readers of my next book will have a better sense of what the Filipinos went through and how extraordinarily did they respond to the situation," Carroll said.

While in Manila, Carroll observed the lack of an archive for war letters unlike in Russia, England and the US.

"I think it would be great if that (archive) were created here because Manila, the Philippines, has such a rich history," Carroll said.

In Russia, where 20 million had perished in wars, a Russian woman curtly told Carroll that "war is not funny" when he was trying to look for a letter that had humor.

"I was not trying to make light of the war, but just to see how people were able to survive the difficulties of war using a little but of humor," he said.

In Russia, Carroll found the most number of war correspondence.

In the many letters he read, the most common entry revolved on how "many of them (war veterans) felt strongly about the cause they were fighting for but many wanted the fighting to be over."

"They want to win, especially the combat soldiers regardless of country, but they have developed a real hatred for war because they see how vicious it is," Carroll said.

How It All Started

Carroll has come a long way from the humble endeavor he began in 1989 after a fire gutted his family’s home in Washington, DC.

Then an English major student at the Columbia University in New York City, Carroll said the worst part of the incident was losing his personal letters, love letters and gripping letters from overseas such as one from a friend who recounted to him the Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing in June 1989.

This made him think of what war veterans wrote in their letters to loved ones back home.

After talking to several war veterans, Carroll said he was stunned to learn that many of them simply threw these letters away. "They were just modest. They reasoned that they were not generals or anybody famous. (They thought) who would care about what some PFC (private first class) wrote home?" But Carroll did.

"There is so much history that we learn from these correspondence. These are the eyewitness to war," he said.

So he wrote a letter to America’s famous column, "Dear Abby," appealing for people to share their views on war letters. It was published on Veterans’ Day, Nov. 11, 1998.

Three days later, the post office called to inform him that three huge bins of war letters await to be picked up.

And the timing was perfect for Legacy Project to be born.

"It was a time when Americans romanticized war. The movie ‘Saving Private Ryan’ came out and so did Tom Brokaw’s book, ‘The Greatest Generation,’" he said.

To date, Carroll has gathered 75,000 letters from every single American war, which he is keeping in vaults in different buildings in Washington for safekeeping.

He is certain to gather so much more because of the warm welcome he has been receiving from every city he has visited.

"Someone told me that they appreciate someone who came to their country to listen to their perspectives. It shows a sign of respect to them," Carroll explained.

He said he is now "hooked for life on this project," hoping it would inspire other people to preserve their own war letters.

"In fact, a similar project has already been launched in Canada," he said.

"I hope by getting word out about this project, people will get inspired to call up museums and archives and ask if they would be interested in our letters and make sure that the letters are passed from one generation to the next so that history is saved," Carroll said.

For more information about the Legacy Project, log on to www.warlettersinternational.com or e-mail Andrew Carroll at [email protected] or [email protected].