He let them know he had received a letter from his brother Vincent (also in the US Navy), that he was over his cold, and how much he loved spending time with his mother at home during his leave. He had been assigned to a newly commissioned ship, the submarine USS Tilefish (SS-307), and thought she “is a real beauty.” He talked about meeting a lot of nice people on the train and how it helped break up the monotony. Heard’s letter starts with a status update-he had arrived after a long train ride to his next duty station. A great example of this type of letter was written by Bernard Madison Heard on December 16, 1943, to his mother and father in New Orleans, Louisiana. They ask about family, let you know if they are sick, they might render an opinion on something, talk about a girl-very similar to the conversations that casually take place around a dinner table at home. Similarly, many letters you read do not tell you a lot about what a person is going through in that moment because they are reaching out just to keep the conversation going and feel some sense of normalcy or to shield you from the truth. If you went back and read your text messages, emails, or transcripts of phone conversations from previous years you would likely be very bored by the majority of the details. But if you look past the content on the pages you realize that letters are a tool of the basic human desire to stay in communication with each other, they enable people to do it from a distance. Most of these letters are very similar-basic communications back and forth between family-hardly material for a novel or great historic work. We have thousands of them in our collection, representing every service branch and theater. During my time as a curator I have found that letters, more often than not, are mundane. As a colleague once said to me-something we often hear about our profession-we hang out and read other people’s mail, but it is ok because the letters are very old.
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