Literary Response To War and Peace

            Its always been the letter most feared on the home front, the death notice. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article titled The Last Letter Home.  When a soldier falls, commanders face a profound task; Accounting for a lost life to the family. The American military has a tradition going back to the Revolutionary War for commanders to write letters, still often by hand, to the families of the fallen soldier. Often these letters will give specific details of the soldier’s death as well as general comments about the quality of the person, his bravery, friendships, and the comradeship they enjoyed in the service of their country. The Journal article opens with the lines:

“How do you start a letter like this? How do you end it? On a raw November morning here, along the wild frontier bordering Pakistan, Lt. Col. Michael Fenzel spoke these words as he sat down to write to a father who would never see his son again.”

            When these letter became mandatory to write in 1948 there was a six paragraph guideline; today that’s grown to eight pages of “chillingly specific rules.” Fenzel anticipated the sad chore when he shipped out to Afghanistan and, so that he not have to use ordinary printer papers for such momentous correspondence,  brought with him some parchment stationery bearing the Airborne crest and seal. He wrote to the father of a deceased soldier, “Sir, we are very fortunate to have known and served with your son. We all know the irreparable loss you and your strong family have suffered, and we also know that there is very little any of us can say that will provide you any comfort.”   To read this article in full, see: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120588448903246933.html

The online WSJ article also contains some reader responses, one from a parent  of a young female soldier who died in Irag, who wrote:

 “I know that Lt. Col. Michael Fenzel and other commanding officers have a difficult time writing the “last letter home” However, as difficult as that task may be, it is immeasurably easier to write such a letter than to read it. As recipients of one such letter and many, many others written after our daughter Maj. Megan M. McClung was killed in Ar Ramadi on Dec. 6, 2006, we have come to know her through the eyes and hearts of her friends, fellow Marines, soldiers and those who only knew her from a distance but all of whom loved her. We now know her in a detail that is usually never afforded to the parents of grown children. Thank you for the article.  

And another:

“Nearly 60 years ago, I faced similar challenges as Lt. Col. Fenzel, and they were tough. The 382nd General Hospital received wounded soldiers from Korea’s battlefields. As the hospital registrar, I was also the commanding officer of all patients. A decorated sergeant was flown to our hospital with severe burns over most of his body. His prognosis was bad. A 14-year-old daughter was his nearest of kin and, according to him, his only relative. The hospital commander found me at my desk late one night with a pencil and blank pad trying to compose that Last Letter. He told me that there was a form I could use in the Army Regs. “Just have your clerk copy it and sign it,” he said. I couldn’t do that, and I finally drafted the very best message I could that a child might understand and perhaps treasure.”

            Iraq and Afghanistan in today’s war have now generated four thousand of these letters. During World War II, there were over 292,000 Americans in the military who lost their live in battle. First would come the official War Department Telegram, followed by a personal letter from a commanding officer. Sometimes grieving loved ones would also receive a carefully worded personal letter from a fellow serviceman, written from a foxhole, a crowed ship’s berth, or a flyer’s ready room during a lull in the action. Such was the cae for Mr. & Mrs. Claude M. Hilton who received the news that their only son, Private First Class John W. Hilton had been killed in action. The three letters reproduced here, which followed the initial telegram, are from Rod Cragg’s remarkable book, From Foxholes and Flight Decks, Letters home From World War II.  (becker &mayer!, Belview, Wash. 2002.) The first letters is from Hiltons commander, Captain James B. Vanderwater “The loss of your son…is felt by every member of this command….He was a splendid soldier. This he proved by his conduct on the filed of battle. The second letter, received a month later, is a deeply moving and intensely personal letter from a junior officer in their son’s infantry company, Second Lieutenant Ralph C. Clontz “My heart bleeds for you” he told the Hiltons, “and believe me when I tell you I was as crushed as you. [Your son] died in my arms …I personally could not have loved him more had he been my son or brother.” The third letter, received a year after the war ended carried such a tone of absolute finality reading “The War Department is most desirous that you be furnished information regarding the burial location of your son.”

             For more information on this remarkable book, please see: http://www.beckermayer.com/catalog.html             The class recently viewed the Oliver Stone’s 1989 movie Born On the Fourth of July starring Tom Cruise based on events of the Vietnam War. In one intensely moving scene, Cruise visited the family of a fallen soldier that he himself had killed in a “friendly fire” incident. The family had only received on the most generalized official information on the details of theirs son’s death and the film so vividly portrayed the varying reactions of family members to Cruise’s words. To see actual clips from this movie and read reviews, please see:http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/6747/Born-on-the-Fourth-of-July/overview