It is a book about going off to war, a book about coming back home, and a book about those who are left behind. This manuscript is the result of those letters and those stories. Some preferred not to talk about it others felt like it had released a great burden. With the help of a Jerome Foundation Grant and a Loft McKnight grant, I visited several of the men in Mississippi, Alaska, and South Dakota and interviewed them about their experiences. Over the next years, I read hundreds of letters that my mother and my grandfather had saved from the boys, spanning many years. It said, “Someday I want to sit down and tell you what it was like to be a young man going off to war.” I taped that card over my desk and began to imagine their voices. Several years ago, one of those uncles wrote a line at the bottom of his Christmas card. My uncles wrote back and thanked me for writing. My letters were written in wide, awkward printing on little girl stationary. I wrote about school, basketball games, and the books I was reading. I wrote about ice-skating at the park on a cold Iowa Saturday. Even then, I knew that words could make one feel better. Looking back, I guess it is a bit unusual for a girl of nine or ten to write letters to her uncles in Vietnam, in Thailand, in Cambodia. I had five uncles in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. I spent a lot of time worrying about that map. When my mother received an airmail letter, she would walk to the map and move one of the stickpins to a new location to see if one of her brothers was in harm’s way in some new hot spot or battle. When I was in the fourth grade, we had a map of Vietnam on our kitchen wall.
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