‘You can be for or against the war, and be moved by these writings’

numbers of sailors and airmen and one Coast Guardsman among the dead. Almost all the others who died were Marines. Forty- three of the dead were women. About a quarter were from Guard or Reserve.

The letters home, a mix of the plain and poetic, are a poignant legacy of those American dead.

Weaver’s letter is today framed and hanging in Savannah’s bedroom in Fayetteville, N. C. “ I would hope that when she grows up, she knows how much he adored her,” says N ancy W eaver, t he s ol dier’s widow. Savannah is 3 now.

Scholars who study and collect war correspondence say the letters help bring into focus individual loss. “ The overall impact of these letters is that it reminds us of the humanity of these troops and how they are not statistics,” says Andrew Carroll, editor of two collections, Behind the Lines

and War Letters.

“ So that when we look at a number like 2,000, those are 2,000 individual stories of lives lost, every one of them that had enormous potential, and . . . 2,000 families that have been impacted as well.”

The letters transcend opinion and politics, says Jon Peede, director of Operation Homecoming, a project of the National Endowment for the Arts to col l ct e the writings of men and women at war. “ You can be for or against the war, and be moved by these writings,” he says.

The letters and e- mails that families shared with USA TODAY begin with “ Hi, Princess” or “ Hey, Mom,” with “ Hey, Baby” or “ Dear Family.” They tell of sandstorms and tripledigit temperatures, the monotony of war and a gnawing desire for home and normalcy.

“ Keep your eyes open for a 323 or 325 BMW, 2002 or 2003. That’s what I want,” Marine Lance Cpl. Deryk Hallal, 24, writes to his parlude the National ents in Indianapolis, in a letter received on April 3, 2004, “ Oh! Send some goodies. Beef jerky and things like that. Tell people at church to keep praying for everyone here.”

Often, soldiers and Marines to the death tugging at them each day.

“ God was with us on all of our patrols,” Hallal writes. He was shot and killed during street > ghting in Ramadi on April 6, 2004. Itwas one of the bloodiest months of the war: 135 Americans died.

Carroll says a last letter has the power to re- animate, even for a moment, those lost. “ It draws us into their story,” he says. “ There is that sense of mystery, of what was that person thinking and what happened to them.”

These are some of those stories:

Family photo