LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - When Andrew Carroll's house burned down ten years ago, he lost all the letters he'd saved over his lifetime. But he gained a new passion, beginning a project realized in "War Letters," an installment of PBS' "American Experience," which airs Nov. 11 after the series moves to Sundays this fall.
Using no narration, "War Letters" is composed entirely of the correspondences between soldiers and their loved ones, plus letters from medics, interned Americans and others affected by wars. Actors -- including Edward Norton, Esai Morales, Joan Allen and David Hyde Pierce -- read the letters over stock footage, home movies, photos and the occasional reenactment.
Carroll, who wrote the best selling "War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars" upon which the hour-long documentary is based, begun by writing to Dear Abby, encouraging people to save their family letters. The advice columnist ran his plea as part of her Veterans Day column and asked readers to send photocopies of their letters to Carroll.
Fifty thousand letters later, Carroll has obtained such priceless finds as a note written on Adolf Hitler's personal stationary. The captured soldier who sent the letter home crossed out Hitler's name and wrote his own (presumably so his family would know he was writing of his own volition, rather than being manipulated by the Germans), and recounted the horrors of the Dachau prison camp, which he had just seen.
While many common themes run through the letters, Carroll says there is a historical arc as well.
"In World War I, there's an 'aw shucks' idealism,'" Carroll said Thursday (July 26) at the annual Television Critics Association Press Tour. "By World War II, there's a sophistication."
He was most taken by letters from the Korean War, which, unlike in other wars, were not censored by the government.
"It's almost the foreshadow of Vietnam," Carroll says. "The bitterness is rising."
If the U.S. goes to battle again, letters home may be in the form of email -- but Carroll says there's no substitute for snail mail.
"You see the little splotches of blood and mud. One letter even has a bullet hole through it…It gives it a power and an immediacy."
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