The Folder

A big part of this book will be the actual letters from people back home. For anyone not familiar with the "Any Service Member" mail project, during Desert Shield / Desert Storm, any person in the US could write a letter, and address it to "Any Service Member" and it would then be delivered at random to someone in the war zone. My ship was one of the main distribution points for this mail, we used our 2 helos to move the boxes of mail from shore to ship, then ship to ship. Eventually it got to the point there was so much mail that the other ships asked us to stop bringing so much, they didn't have room for it all. I made it a point to grab a hand full of letters at the end of each shift, sit down and read then. At first it was just to pass the time, and I'd write back as I had time. Eventually I noticed there were a lot of people asking the same questions, so I wrote up a news letter that I would send out to the people I had picked out of the mail bag. I decided to stop when I had hit 100 people, it seemed like a nice easy number. A few weeks later, I started getting personal replies back from the people had sent letters to. In all, I had about 50 people who replied to me directly at least once, out of the 100, and there were many who wrote back regularly. I had some that I kept in contact several years after Desert Storm in fact, and I got to meet a few of them in person. How cool is that?

Anyway, I just wanted to include a quick over view of how many letters there really were. This video runs about 12 minutes or so, I just set the camera up and let it run as I pulled a few letters out, just to give you an idea.

Thanks for following along!
Carlin
@carlincomm