Letters from Vietnam: Voices of War

Published in 2003, Letters from Vietnam is a collection of personal missives written by servicemen and women to their loved ones during the Vietnam War. Edited by Bill Adler, the letters offer honest, unique perspectives of the war from a wide range of participants: soldiers of all ranks, medical personnel, advisors, Red Cross volunteers, and South Vietnamese allies. Adler identifies the author of each letter, their military rank, honors, and any specific engagements in which they participated. The book is supplemented with black-and-white photographs as well as images of handwritten notes. Al Santoli, author of Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War, describes Letters from Vietnam as a “mosaic of firsthand descriptions, reflections, and raw emotions.”

The collected letters represent the full timespan of the United States’ engagement in the Vietnam War: from 1965, when the US entered the conflict, through 1973, when the Paris Peace Accords ended US involvement in the war. The book is divided into four sections: “Combat,” “Life,” “The Vietnamese People,” and “Reflection.” Each section is prefaced with a defining epigraph excerpted from one of the letters.

“Combat” opens with a letter from Marine Corps Corporal Jon Johnson to his parents and wife. In it, Johnson describes his first battle and the pain of losing fellow soldiers. He recounts a shell coming out of the sky “like a freight train,” killing two and wounding nine others: “That was it, just one shell. But my God what a price.” Other soldiers share graphic stories of their experiences. They detail the overwhelming heat and muddy jungle conditions. The noise of mortar fire. Their own physical and mental exhaustion. They witness horrific injuries and deaths. First Lieutenant James Michener, a helicopter pilot, reflects, “How odd and unpredictable are individual men’s destinies. One dies. One lives. A third observes each and writes about both. How long will the snuffing out of a life live in my memory?” Michener wonders how witnessing death will change him as a person. SP-4 Kenneth W. Bagby tells his family about holding his best friend and watching him die. Bagby concludes that he hopes his son will never have to “see or experience the horrors of war,” and pledges to give his life to ensure that he never does.



In “Life,” servicemen and women describe their day-to-day living conditions. Sergeant George R. Bassett describes leeches in the trees, finding gold in local streams, and wishing for more pound cake and Kool-Aid from home. Five women with the American Red Cross “clubmobile” attached to the Big Red One (the 1st Infantry Division) detail a day in their life devoted to raising morale. They end their day “dreaming of peace.” Richard Elliot adopts two kittens because, he says, “They are cute and I’m softhearted.” One soldier shares how the joy of having his sleeping bag finally dry out turns to despair when it is drenched in a rainstorm. A flight surgeon is dismayed at the number of people who attempt suicide by overdosing on pills. Airman First Class Frank Pilson recounts his experience serving in the Honor guard when President Johnson reviews the troops at his base, and the pride he feels as an American.

Navy man William P. Twiggs writes home, “We take our freedom for granted,” in the third section of the book, “The Vietnamese People.” He tells his family that Americans represent the freedom the South Vietnamese have been fighting for. Emil Spadafora writes to his mother praying for her to adopt a twelve-year-old Vietnamese boy, who is the sole survivor in a town razed by the Viet Cong (VC). Barbara J. Lilly, one of the American Red Cross “Donut Dollies,” visits an orphanage and is appalled by the conditions: the young children are covered in sores and have no medicine or clean water source. She hopes they will be able to “get the place some help but there’s always a problem as the Vietnamese won’t always use what they’re given.”

The final section of Letters from Vietnam, “Reflection,” examines servicemen and women’s reactions to the war itself and to the social and political upheaval the war causes back home. Anti-war demonstrations like the march on Washington, D.C. “are a slap in the face to most of the guys over here,” according to Sergeant David L. Glading. He thinks that the protests empower the VC. One soldier, writing to his friend in Idaho, feels that the Vietnamese people “do not appreciate what we are trying to do for them.” He sees how prices are marked up for Americans, observes Vietnamese stealing from Americans and looting their bodies, and watches Vietnamese dodging their own military service. He wonders, “Why I must fight and risk death when many young Vietnamese men do not.” Colonel James B. Lincoln has another perspective on the South Vietnamese army. He knows they are good fighters, but, he believes, they suffer from bad morale, are underpaid, and poorly led. In the last letter in the book, dated 1974 after the peace agreement, Sergeant Major Raymond Ebbets notes that while some of the Vietnamese people are “willing to forget the Americans and all our help…a greater number do remember.”