AIRMAIL: A STORY OF WAR POEMS

When I was in the fourth grade, we had a map of Vietnam on our kitchen wall. When my mother received an airmail letter, she would walk to the map and move one of the stickpins to a new location to see if one of her brothers was in harm's way in some new hot spot or battle. I spent a lot of time worrying about that map. I had five uncles in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Looking back, I guess it is a bit unusual for a girl of nine or ten to write letters to her uncles in Vietnam, in Thailand, in Cambodia. Even then, I knew that words could make one feel better. I wrote about ice-skating at the park on a cold Iowa Saturday. I wrote about school, basketball games, and the books I was reading. My letters were written in wide, awkward printing on little girl stationary. My uncles wrote back and thanked me for writing. Several years ago, one of those uncles wrote a line at the bottom of his Christmas card. It said, "Someday I want to sit down and tell you what it was like to be a young man going off to war." I taped that card over my desk and began to imagine their voices. Over the next years, I read hundreds of letters that my mother and my grandfather had saved from the boys, spanning many years. With the help of a Jerome Foundation Grant and a Loft McKnight grant, I visited several of the men in Mississippi, Alaska, and South Dakota and interviewed them about their experiences. I recalled stories from my childhood. They filled in the details. Some preferred not to talk about it; others felt like it had released a great burden. This manuscript is the result of those letters and those stories. It is a book about going off to war, a book about coming back home, and a book about those who are left behind. I took a few liberties with the facts simply because I do not know all there is to know, but I tried to retain the voices I have heard my whole life, the voices that ring true on parchment paper sent in airmail letters from all over the world. I dedicate this book to those voices, to my family, and every voice calling out at times of war: "I miss you. I love you. I wish I was home."