(NEXSTAR) — It’s been 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War but its impact on American families continues to be felt even to this day. Nowhere are the accounts of those who fought — including those who did not return — more intimate than in the letters they sent and/or received during the nearly 20-year battle overseas.
Recently, two people who work to preserve the personal stories from the Vietnam War spoke to Nexstar’s Marielena Balouris about their efforts.
Andrew Carroll, the founding director of the Center for American War Letters at Chapman University says that Vietnam Veteran letters provide an interesting portrait of the war. Carroll explains that soldiers were careful what they put in their letters (lest they be intercepted by the opposition) and also that many of them didn’t want to explicitly say how bad things were.
One letter Carroll shared was from Peace Corps volunteer John Pullman, who responded to a friend’s letter, who was fervently against America’s involvement in the war. Carroll quoted from the letter: “It’d be interesting to know what you expect me to say — whether the military has turned me into an establishment tool or if I’m more anti-war,” wrote the soldier. “… All I care about is survival.”
Carroll explains that like many others who fought in the war, they just wanted to get through the time they had to spend there and get home.
Unfortunately, Carroll reveals that Pullman died sometime the same day after writing that exact letter.
“Hours after writing this, after explaining he didn’t care about the politics of the war and just wanted to make it home… tragically, this is the last thing he wrote.”
Carroll described letters from wars as “the world’s greatest undiscovered literature,” explaining that he finds the letters to be artistic and moving.
Meanwhile, Monica Mohindra, director of the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project, says the project is made up of 120,000 collections of U.S. veterans’ first-person experiences. Mohindra says reading about the Vietnam War is so much different than hearing first-person accounts — which present stories you might never see in a history book.
One such story, which is featured among the Veterans History Project collections, belongs to Cleveland King Jr., who tells of the racism he experienced as Black soldier.
“We all had our separate groups, and I don’t know where we were but the commanding officer came down with, ‘We don’t want no more than three Black soldiers sitting at a table at one time,” recalled King Jr. “I wasn’t gonna take it. So I went to him and I pleaded my case and I said, ‘These [white] people — they can sit by themselves or with as many as they can. You won’t say a word. But you’re telling us we can only sit three to a table? So finally, they dissolved it.”
Mohindra says these kinds of little-known personal accounts are what the Veterans History Project is all about. She also says it’s important for veterans to have channels with which to leave their stories, since most people won’t ask and most veterans won’t just bring up their experiences without prompting.
Especially veterans of Vietnam, given the war’s wide unpopularity and the general disregard for its veterans.
To explore the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project’s virtual collections, visit loc.gov/vets. Also check out the Center for American War Letters’ digitized war letters collections for a deeper dive into their archives.