‘War Letters’ Campaign: National initiative to honor 10th Mountain Division seeking letters, emails from active duty members, veterans and families

Soon, his words, along with those of his fellow brothers in arms of the 10th Mountain Division, both past and present, will be displayed for all to see.

The “Climb to Glory/War Letters” Campaign has been launched to find letters and emails written by active duty members and veterans of the 10th Mountain Division, as well as by their families. The announcement was made Saturday to mark the anniversary of when the 10th Mountain Division was constituted on July 10, 1943.

The overall mission of the campaign is to encourage anyone associated with the 10th Mountain Division to see if they have any war-related correspondences that can be used to honor and remember the sacrifices made by the division, as well as allow them to be preserved and displayed. The letters and emails that are collected will be shared with the public through educational programs for students, the Museum of American War Letters, the “Behind the Lines Podcast,” and will possibly be featured at local events in the future for guests to read.

These letters are being made public for the first time in a dedicated collection of a new kind of history museum dedicated to war letters penned by U.S. service members — or emails sent by modern soldiers to family and friends. The Museum of American War Letters, a completely virtual museum with no physical address, opened in March, corresponding with National Vietnam War Veterans Day with an inaugural wing dedicated to the same conflict.

The 10th Mountain Division collection will include the handwritten letter from Sgt. Harapko. A shortened excerpt of his letter is as follows:

“First I want to say I love you so much. You were always there for me even though I would never talk about my problems. [...] I don’t want you to worry about me. (I know you will cause I’m your son). Mom I’m not afraid to die for something that is right.”

Following a devastating house fire in 1989, where the loss of various letters and memorabilia he had previously taken for granted forced him to realize their importance, Andrew Carroll started what was called The Legacy Project in November of 1998 with a mission to encourage Americans to save their war letters and share them to be archived.

Totally unplanned and mostly due to word of mouth, Mr. Carroll started reading and seeing more and more war letters, collecting as he went. By 1998, he had hundreds of letters that people had shared with him and he realized his mission to preserve them.

“The irony is I don’t come from a military family, I didn’t even like history back then, but I just thought that these letters were worth preserving,” the historian and director of the Center for American War Letters said.

To kick off the campaign in 1998, a column appeared in “Dear Abby.” A P.O. box had been set up for people to send in letters and they delivered. Mr. Carroll remembers being “inundated with responses.” The Washington Post caught wind and covered the story and sparked a large amount of future media coverage.

Now, the new campaign has been launched for a different, but not unrelated, endeavour — to honor the 10th Mountain Division.

While the campaign has some things from the 10th Mountain Division, it really needs more to create a full exhibit, so work is underway to raise awareness and get the word out that repositories and archives exist for these letters. Although the focus is on the 10th Mountain, the campaign is always looking for war letters by anybody, from any conflict. It also accepts email correspondence.

“I physically have Josh’s letter and his mom even gave me his uniform, it’s a pretty powerful little collection,” Mr. Carroll said. “We should have tons of letters from 10th Mountain Division, but we just don’t. We know they’re out there, we just want families to know that we’d really like to use them to honor the entire division.”

The virtual format of the Museum of American War Letters makes its collections available to a much wider audience than a single physical address would allow and there is no admission fee to view exhibits. The cost of creating the museum was covered by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to Chapman University. The virtual museum’s exterior is being created by a physical architecture firm that Mr. Carroll said has put in more than 200 hours to do a rendering of the outside of the museum.

Visitors to the museum are presented with a long, dark virtual hallway with recessed lighting and various letters, photos and memorabilia adorning the walls and begging for closer inspection. A computer and strong internet connection are all that is needed to enjoy the displays. Both the museum and the “Behind the Lines” podcast can be accessed from a menu to the right at www.WarLetters.us. A future episode of the podcast will feature readings of letters from the 10th Mountain Division.

“Letters like these are being thrown out every single day, we have over 175,000 letters that people have shared with us,” Mr. Carroll said of the displays. “This is gonna be the first time we’ve ever focused on a single division to honor and remember them, that’s why the Climb for Glory campaign is very unique.”

The team organizing the “Climb to Glory/War Letters” Campaign includes Mr. Carroll; Celia Straus, award-winning producer and New York Times bestselling author; and Barbara Harrison, Emmy-winning journalist, founder of the BHM Group, and co-host, with Mr. Carroll, of the “Behind the Lines Podcast.”

For more information about the “Climb to Glory/War Letters” Campaign or to share letters, contact Mr. Carroll at WarLetterProject@aol.com. This will be the first wing of the virtual museum dedicated to just one division.

Jill A. Van Hoesen, director of business development for Westelcom, met Mr. Carroll through work-related networking. Her husband, Glenn Sr., and their son, Glenn Jr., both served in the military, so she has her own letters from both to dig out and possibly contribute to the collection.

She and her family came to the area as part of the original buildup of Fort Drum, some of the first people assigned to Fort Drum in the 1980s when they activated the 10th Mountain Division again. The family chose to stay in the area and have lived here, a part of the community, since 1987.

“I feel that we’re very lucky where we live, because the support for the military, from the north country as a whole, is probably very unique to anywhere else in the world,” Mrs. Van Hoesen said. “I think that we need to cherish that, as well as expand upon that now to be able to showcase Fort Drum and the 10th Mountain Division as one of the best divisions in the Army.”

Never previously planning to do a book when all of the letter-gathering began, Mr. Carroll encountered thousands of “amazing” letters early on that had never been published, and the rest is history. Following popularity from a New York Times article, all publishers that were approached wanted to publish the book that eventually became War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars.

Mr. Carroll later traveled to dozens of countries collecting various correspondence from conflicts the U.S. was involved in — penned by both friends and foes — which became another book titled “Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters — and One Man’s Search to Find Them.”

Eventually, a play was produced at Chapman University in California based on the war letters from the books called “If All the Sky Were Paper,” which has since been performed across the country. Now, there’s a podcast called “Behind the Lines” that Mr. Carroll co-hosts with Barbara Harrison.

Locally, talks with the Fort Drum Chapter of AUSA are in the preliminary planning stages for creation of a local committee focusing on the 10th Mountain Division and ties to the north country. According to Mrs. Van Hoesen, a search is on for people to fill various committee seats, and a date for the committee to meet via Zoom is being set for late July or early August.

This committee will be spearheading local events with interactive displays and letter gathering destinations in the future. Local enthusiasts are encouraged to reach out to local contact Mrs. Van Hoesen at 315-755-3929 or jvanhoesen@westelcom.net for further information on 10th Mountain-specific donation options, volunteer opportunities and other planned activities.

Doug W. Schmidt, historian for the National Association of the 10th Mountain Division, Inc., is a veteran of the division himself. Now, he is involved with the campaign effort and hopes it succeeds.

“I deployed several times with the division, I went to Bosnia, Kosovo, back in 1999-2000 and then 2001-2002 as well as to Iraq in 2003 and through all those deployments and everything, it was always writing letters back to the family, home and everything,” he said. “I myself have experience with this as well as my great grandfather was a veteran of the division in World War II, and having had an opportunity to look over some of his letters as well back to his family when he was serving with the division, and through my work as a historian I primarily focus on the 10th Mountain Division, the letters home are a great source of information about the division.”

He noted that if you want a perspective of how it really is someplace, always go back to the letters, not what somebody wrote in a report or something that gets polished off by commanders and whoever else.

“We’re in kind of the early stages of this, it’s going to be kind of interesting to see,” Mr. Schmidt said. “We’re gonna be kind of learning as we go along, but based on the success that they’ve had already with this project with just the letters in general dating so far back and everything I’m really hoping that we really do the 10th Mountain Division proud and are able to really put together quite a story.”