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Thursday, November 11, 2004

Letters from the Front: Personal touch means so much

By AUDREY PARENTE | News-Journal Staff Writer

DAYTONA BEACH — Leigh Ann Singleton clutches letters from her son Jason as if she were holding onto a part of him.

The letters are cherished, priceless pieces of his thoughts and feelings, while the 26-year-old fights in the war in Iraq.

Today — Veterans Day — the legacy of letters from soldiers, which captured the dread, passion and severity of every war since the American Revolution, is diminishing in the face of e-mail and wireless phone service, said Rich Baker, lead technician at the U.S. Army Military History Institute.

Singleton said she talks by phone and gets an occasional e-mail from her son, but the letters carry deeper thoughts and feelings that have taken more time to express than other short bursts of communication, she said. And there’s something very special about holding a physical letter.

“I have some letters I know he has cried over, because there are tear stains,” Singleton said. Her own eyes fill up as she strokes the paper.

“People are keeping copies of their e-mails, but it won’t be as wide-ranging or deep in quality,” Baker said during a phone interview from the Carlisle, Pa., military archive. As a historian, Baker said he has dealt with the collection of thousands of historic letters and other veterans’ memorabilia for more than a decade.

“Written letters take time to reflect. I am not sure we are going to see that in the more immediate e-mail contacts that occur,” Baker said. “With e-mail, things tend to be more immediate, instantaneous and day-to-day.”

Rick Atkinson, a researcher for The Washington Post and Pulitzer Prize winner for “An Army At Dawn,” about the liberation of Europe and destruction of the Third Reich, said he spends a lot of time poring over letters for his books. He agrees the electronic age has diminished the volume of written materials for research about the current war.

“Every phone conversation is a letter that ain’t writ,” he said in a phone interview while researching at the Carlisle military archive recently.

Jason Weidenmiller’s letters are carefully written not to divulge any war secrets, Singleton said, but he does describe the circumstances of his experiences in Iraq.

“I think I can tell you with complete honesty that today was the worst day of my life. We woke up at 2:00 a.m. and were bused out of the camp and out into the desert . . . temperatures reached 118 degrees, there was no shade and nowhere to hide. . . . I cannot describe to you how seriously miserable and dangerous it was. Someone could have died. This is by far going to be the toughest year of my life. I can already tell, if I make it, it will be a miracle. This place is so harsh.”

Jason’s sister, Jaime Weidenmiller, said the letters reveal part of her brother’s personality she would otherwise miss.

“He’s such a good writer. It’s one thing he really was good at in school,” said the 27-year-old sister, a musician who wrote a tune for her brother titled “The Patriot Poet,” after one letter included a three-page poem.

“When he writes about the desert, you can almost taste the sand,” Jamie Weidenmiller said.

Jason’s letters provide more than just a glimpse into the war, his mother said.

“Sometimes he writes about the past, saying he is sorry if he ever did anything — in case something happens — and, of course, we write ‘don’t talk like that. You are going to come home and go around the world surfing on that big trip with your brother.’ ”

Letters home also have helped a former Port Orange Marine stay close to his sister, who is serving in Iraq.

Nick Horvath, 19, is a Daytona Beach Community College student now. But he was in basic training with the Marines at Parris Island, S.C., earlier this year when his sister, Staff Sgt. Harmony Horvath, wrote to him from Iraq.

“It was real cool to get a letter from her, because when you are in basic training, you can’t use e-mail. It’s nice to get a letter from a family member, especially since she was in Iraq,” said Horvath, who left the Marines because of a permanent injury.

“Anything that is handwritten is more comforting,” he said.

The only comfort Belinda Feathers gets from her military son, Anthony Bush, comes in the form of e-mails. Bush, who will turn 32 on Monday, is serving in the Navy, stationed aboard the USS Harry Truman in the Persian Gulf. He can’t phone home, nor does he send letters.

“I would like to be able to talk to him on the phone, but that is impossible. Even when he e-mails, he can’t tell us where he is, but somewhere in the area of Iraq,” said Feathers of Ormond Beach. “He doesn’t have time to write. Sometimes he e-mails a line to say, ‘Hello, I am OK,’ but he works 12 to 18 hours a day.”

Feathers prints and saves the e-mails. It’s all she has right now.

Baker, at the Military History Institute, said some of the problems with storing e-mail is that “it is a shorthand version of the language. Instead of good-bye, it’s ‘gby,’ and shortened, hyphenated words, and you would need a guide to the slang of computerized words” to use in future research.

Also, an intrinsic part of the writer’s character is lost in computer printouts, unlike the personality portrayed in historic letters, Baker said.

“(Archived) letters run the gauntlet from those that need almost a joint committee to decipher, but some are flowing and obviously educated authors,” he said.

Often missing from e-mails, he said, are poignant expressions of intimate love, humor or gripes.

Shirley Van Hise of Holly Hill said her son, Sgt. Jimmy Van Hise Jr., 25, is in the 101st Army Airborne. The senior field medic spent 11 months in Iraq and came back to Fort Campbell, Ky., in February. Long phone conversations are easy now that her son is stateside, but communication wasn’t easy while he was overseas.

“We talk on the phone now, and it’s not that far, so we travel to see him,” but while he was away, letters home were “few and far between” and the letters “meant everything to us,” Van Hise said.

“We didn’t get the letters for a month or a month-and-a-half after they were written,” she said. “Just knowing your son has touched this paper from so far away was important. It was a difficult time for us.”

Van Hise plans to save the letters, she said.

“They are part of our son and what he has gone through in his life.”

One letter has become part of their family saga, Van Hise said.

“He sent one letter when we were going to meet his future wife. He wrote: ‘I don’t know if you will get to meet Amanda, but I am thinking about marrying her, so let me know if you see something wrong that I haven’t seen,’ ” Van Hise said. “It was very special.”

She wrote back she saw no problems with her future daughter-in-law and never showed Amanda the letter until after her son returned and the couple married.

HICI Special Report — Troop Letters: Sending our hearts to the front line

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