Life Last Letters Home

War letters are, by their nature, intensely emotional, honest and heartfelt documents. They are letters like no others, written when the extreme peril of battle forces one to look at life in an entirely new way. Moments and memories are cherished with an urgency that hadn't been there before. The future is an elusive dream. Especially poignant among war letters are the last letters home. These messages may express many things: Hope. Pride. Fear. Exhaustion. Love. But they take on an extraordinary new weight when the reader brings to them a knowledge of what has occurred. The letters in this Life book-from Robert Wise's comic pick-me-ups sent to his mom; to Michelle Witmer's and Rachel Bosveld's vivid accounts of action in Iraq; to Jesse Givens's passionate last words to his young family (a letter that he told his wife not to open unless he was killed)-give a thoroughly human face to the war. Beyond the statistics are these lives, bravely lived. In Last Letters Home, 14 families share their stories with Life's readers and come before Life's cameras; several of them participated as well in the HBO/New York Times project of the same name, which has produced a documentary to premiere on Veterans Day, November 11, 2004. It took courage for the families to publicly recall these sons, daughters, spouses and parents. Courage-theirs and the courage of those now deceased-is on every page of this book. From the editors of One Nation: America Remembers September 11, 2001 Life has long been one of the country's preeminent publishers of periodicals and books, and is renowned for its presentation of photography. This new Life volume comes from the team of editors whose One Nation: America Remembers September 11, 2001 spent a half year on The New York Times Best Sellers list and was called by The Wall Street Journal "a thorough and thoughtful telling." In the fall of 2004, Life, which was originally launched as a weekly magazine in 1936, again began publishing with that frequency.Sullivan, Robert is the author of 'Life Last Letters Home', published 2004 under ISBN 9781593151638 and ISBN 1593151632.