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• The Legacy Project
• War Letters on PBS

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Tavis: In 1998, writer Andrew Carroll launched an initiative called The Legacy Project, which sought to preserve wartime correspondence as a way to honor U.S. armed forces. The project, that is, has led now to 3, count 'em, 3 'New York Times' bestsellers, including 'War Letters,' which served as the basis for an American Experience documentary right here on PBS. His latest collection of letters is called 'Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters and One Man's Search to Find Them.' Andrew, nice to have you on the program.

Andrew Carroll: Great to be here. Thank you.

Tavis: Glad to have you. What search did you go through to find these letters?

Carroll: 35 countries around the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan. Spent 2 years going around the U.S. as well. And it's just to seek out really the soldier's perspective: the marines, the airmen, the sailors. What's war like from their view, not from the politicians, the generals, the military leaders. What's it like to be in the eye of the storm?

Tavis: That's a lot to do to go in search of letters, and you've done this 3 times now. Why are you so passionate about this kind of project?

Carroll: And there's no one in my family that's military. I have no military service. What happened was we had a fire in our house, everything got wiped out, and for me, the worst part of it was losing the letters. And it got me thinking about the importance of letters. I talked to veterans, and they said they were throwing their letters away. They were very modest. And so I wanted to start this project as a way to pay tribute to them, and again, through their perspective, through their words.

Tavis: This book is uniquely different because the letters in it are not just letters from American servicemen and women; they are indeed letters from servicemen and women from countries around the globe. Tell me how distinctly different that makes this project.

Carroll: I wanted to show the humanity of warfare, and so these are all American wars, but you have, as you said, soldiers from different countries. There are Russian letters from Stalingrad and Bosnians who are going through the bombings in Sarajevo. And it's to show war from their standpoint and what it was like to be in that crisis. So you really don't notice many differences. The common humanity comes through. And I hope that as you read the book, you don't see that, "Oh, this is a Kuwaiti" or "This is an Australian" or "This is a Brit or a Canadian." You say, "That's a mom" or "That's a father," "That's a brother." and you read it as if you're that person experiencing the same trauma.

Tavis: You in part answered the question I want to ask just now, in fact, but as a tool, as a technique, what does a reader get from a book like this, reading the letters of others who they don't know, have nothing in common with necessarily? What does one get from reading a book like this rather than some other story?

Carroll: History text. Exactly. It makes it personal that you can really empathize with these people and what they're going through. It's not dates, names, statistics. It's the voices. It's the personalities. And I think that's what comes through throughout the book.

Tavis: I wonder whether or not--and I admittedly have not had a chance to delve into this the way I want to. I will when we get off the air, I hope, in the coming days. But I read enough of it to know, as I said earlier, that there are letters from around the globe and not just American servicemen and women. But I'm also curious, as I get more into this, whether or not I'm going to find letters that really don't glamorize war. I tend to find when I read letters that people who--editors who make these choices as to what makes the book, you know, certainly on the patriotism tip--won't really put the good stuff in there. When I say good stuff, I mean the stuff that really does tell the true story about what war really is.

Carroll: I think you've hit on what the whole spirit of the book is, which is to kind of deglamorize warfare, because often we romanticize it. And actually, what I found was that the veterans were the most opposed to this, because if you make war fun and exciting, it's not much of a sacrifice. So I specifically chose letters that were very graphic, very raw, very immediate about what it's like to be in these events, and I don't think you come away from this with any sense that war is something that's glamorous or something that should be romanticized. And my fear is, especially with the popular culture of today, that we are in some ways sanitizing warfare--in video games, in TV, in movies--and it doesn't serve a purpose to history or to those who serve. And we need to talk about war candidly, and that's what this book is about.

Tavis: I want to ask you in a minute to read one or two letters that you have in this book, but before I do that, though, tell me more about your journey, of how you actually found your way, or these letters found their way to you.

Carroll: I was nervous because when I left, anti-American spirit was at its highest. There were rallies, protests--

Tavis: You left when?

Carroll: I left in September 2003 and got back in 2004, and then wrote the book over the past year. When I went, people were burning our flag in all these different cities, and people said to me, who were better traveled than I, be prepared that when you go to these countries, no one's gonna help you in this mission to find these letters. Every single place I went, every city, every town, people went out of their way to be helpful. There was not just a willingness, but an urgency to share these stories, to share these letters. And it's the same thing. The veterans over there felt the same way here, as you can't glamorize this subject. You have to show it for what it is. You have to make it real. And so, when I went to Iraq, when I went to Afghanistan, I spoke with Iraqis, I spoke with the Afghans, "What were you writing during this time?" and many of them shared with me their letters and e-mails. And again, it humanizes this experience.

Tavis: What's the reason, the rationale--I asked earlier the reason or the rationale--from a reader's point of view for why they'd read a book like this? Why do these families, these officers share their most inner thoughts with you? What do they get out of it?

Carroll: I think they know that the spirit of this project is to pay tribute to them, and they've been very open in what they've shared. Very intimate and very candid letters. We had a woman in the Gulf War who--her husband wasn't writing to her, and she wrote a letter to her sister where she said, "You know, I'm over here. I'm known as Captain Frosty 'cause I'm very tough on the outside. Inside I'm dying." and I said, "Why do you want people to know this story?" she said, "Because this is another part of warfare. It's not just combat. It's the separation from our families." and they ended up getting a divorce. And this is part of the war experience that sometimes isn't told.

Tavis: All right, let's read.

Carroll: Sure. And speaking of which, the war experience that isn't told, it's the aftershocks coming home from war and what it's like. This is just an excerpt from a 19-year-old private who was in Iraq. His name is Scott Curry. And he was about to come home, and he was telling his mom that she should be ready for what was coming. He's saying, "Happy Mother's Day. I wish I was there for the second year in a row. I've missed so much since I left for the army. That's what makes coming home more scary than here. At least here we know what to do, shoot back. Home, I will not know what to do, how to act. That's what worries me. Here we use violence to fix problems. I can't do that at home. So I have to re-learn how to live a normal life. I miss you so much and can't wait to see you." We have a letter written 50 years ago from the Korean War almost identical by a young PFC coming home, saying, "I'm not the boy who left. I'm a man who's seen things I'll never forget."

Tavis: When you put this book together, behind the lines, was there a linear line, if I can put it that way, you discovered with regard to letters from different people around the globe?

Carroll: Well, it's more from war to war. The book goes from the American Revolution all the way up to Iraq. And I wanted to show that there are patterns, there are echoes from war to war. We have letters about guerilla warfare going back from to the war of independence that are no different than the fighting in Fallouja. We have the mistreatment of P.O.W.s during the Civil War. No different than what we're hearing about going on today. And I wanted to show these patterns especially for younger people who maybe have an interest in this. They'll see that what we're going through now has been experienced before and you can learn from this, we can all learn from this.

Tavis: I guess that raises a fascinating question, for me, at least. You've done 3 of these now that are bestsellers on the 'New York Times' list. If there is so much to be learned from reading--you know where I'm going with this, obviously. If there's so much to be learned from these letters written 50 years ago and beyond, it doesn't seem we've learned anything from them.

Carroll: That's the sense of urgency that I feel with this project, because we have to keep getting the message out. We have to keep talking about this. We have to keep educating our young people about this. And that's why teachers have used this. I've heard that preachers have been using it in sermons. It has a far reach. And it's not the book, it's the letters. That's what's so powerful. They're all previously unpublished. They're rare. We have a letter by Kurt Vonnegut in there, which he shared with us. He wrote it after he was liberated as a P.O.W., and he said, "I feel it's important that people know these stories." so you just have to keep plodding on with it, and hopefully, at some point, the message will get through.

Tavis: You mentioned earlier how you started writing the first book. You had lost all your letters in a fire. Did you ever imagine that a project like this could turn into not 1, not 2, but 3 projects, all bestsellers?

Carroll: Well, actually, not only that, I didn't like history growing up. And so...

Tavis: And that's the only subject I excelled in.

Carroll: It was too intimidating for me. It was all names and dates and so forth. This is again about--it's the human side of warfare, and that I could relate to, and I'm hoping other people can relate to it as well.

Tavis: Tell me, when you're putting a project like this together, how your emotions run. Do they...

Carroll: Yeah. I was not prepared for this. When Dear Abby did a column on this word-of-mouth initiative back in 1998, as you mentioned earlier, the floodgates opened. We got tens of thousands of letters. And I wasn't prepared for the letters themselves, but I really wasn't prepared for the cover notes that came with them. A woman said, "My brother fought in Vietnam. Here are his letters. He's missing now, but not a P.O.W. He came home, but he was so traumatized by the war that one day he just disappeared. And I just want somebody to remember him. So thank you for this project." And that's the kind of thing that just breaks your heart. And when every letter you open has some sort of story like that, it shows you just how many people have been impacted by war. And it's not just the troops. It's their loved ones, it's their spouses, their parents, everybody. And we have their voices in this book as well.

Tavis: So you're crying all through this. You must use a lot of Kleenex in putting a project like this together.

Carroll: If we ever had a corporate sponsor, it probably would be Kleenex. But there are also some--there's a whole humor chapter. There's some very funny letters. And the humor is how the troops cope. So they use dark humor to get through these experiences. But we really wanted to show the full emotions. And there are letters of pride and patriotism and determination. It's not just the harshness of it, but the sense of courage they embody. And so we want to show all these different aspects of warfare and hopefully just keep getting the message out there.

Tavis: After 3 projects now on something similar, what most surprised you--'cause you've been this way a couple times now--what most surprised you about this particular project?

Carroll: Boy, that's a good question. I would say, probably just in relation to the last question, I just didn't realize how many people were affected by warfare. That we have 150,000 troops overseas right now, but they have millions of friends and family members back here, every one of them anxious about what's going on in their lives and so forth. We have the children of veterans who've been impacted. War's reach, I think, is far greater than sometimes we realize. And that I didn't realize until I got involved in this project. Especially coming from a family where we have no military connections. But my admiration for the troops has just gone up exponentially. And part of the reason we show the very difficult letters, the harshness of war, is to say this is what they've been through. And I think you can't help but admire who they are when you realize the conditions that they've had to survive.

Tavis: I look forward to getting through the rest of it. It is a powerful and revealing book called 'Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters and One Man's Search to Find Them,' written by Andrew Carroll. He knows how to make a book work. 3 times now. Nice to have you on.

Carroll: Thank you very much.

Tavis: All the best to you. Glad to have you on this program. Up next on this program, Oscar-nominated actress Shohreh Aghdashloo. Stay with us. We'll have a wonderful conversation with her in just a moment. If you saw 'House of Sand and Fog,' you'll recognize her. If you watched '24,' you'll recognize her. She's coming up in just a moment.