Andrew Carroll never ceases to amaze me. For those of you who may not be familiar with him, he is the founder and director of The Legacy Project that "works to honor and remember those who have served this nation in wartime by seeking out and saving their letters."

Not content to publish the bestseller, War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars, and donate all his earnings from the book to veterans groups, Andrew has launched a new initiative to give away two million copies of War Letters to active and retired military personnel and is currently on a cross-country road trip as part of this effort. I'll share more details about this undertaking, but first, I'd like to share what motivates Andrew. Here, in his own words, is his story:

The Battle to Preserve War Letters
I had no particular interest in history or letters until a fire swept through my family's home in Washington, D.C. just before Christmas of 1989. Thankfully, no one was hurt (even Claude, our cat, bounded out safely), but all our possessions were destroyed. As I walked cautiously through the burnt-out shell of our house several days later, it suddenly occurred to me that all my letters were gone. The clothes, the furniture, the books, just about everything else could be replaced, but not the letters.

There was certainly nothing worthy of the National Archives, mostly just correspondences with old girlfriends and high school buddies traveling abroad. But I did have a series of riveting letters by a friend who was in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989. It was crushing to realize that his letters, along with the seemingly trivial ones, were now gone.

The fire—which, in retrospect was something of a godsend—inspired in me a lifelong passion for letters. And ultimately it triggered the creation of the Legacy Project, a national nonprofit organization I founded in 1998 that encourages Americans to seek out and preserve their family correspondence.

Our focus on war began after I spoke with a handful of veterans who said that they had thrown away their old letters. They were very modest about their service and felt no one would be interested in what they had written. Even more tragically, I discovered that over a thousand veterans were dying a day, and their loved ones were often discarding their letters as well. This was stunning to me. The few war letters I had seen were more emotionally intense and dramatic than anything I had ever read. Composed under life and death circumstances, every letter took on new meaning. Soldiers never knew if that letter would be their last, which often inspired in them greater clarity and poetry of expression. "You don't mince words in a foxhole," one veteran explained to me.

On a whim, I contacted "Dear Abby" and asked her to write a column urging her readers to save their war letters and, if they thought they had something historically significant, to send a photocopy to the Legacy Project. "Dear Abby" agreed, and the column appeared on November 11—Veterans Day—1998.

Three days later, the post office called. "Is this Andrew Carroll?" a clerk asked testily. I said it was. "You need to come down here now and get your mail." I assured the clerk that I would hop on my bike and be there in minutes. "Bring a car," he said, and hung up. He wasn't kidding.

Bins and bins of letters were pouring in. I immediately tore into the envelopes and began reading. Here were eyewitness accounts of Gettysburg and D-Day, Shiloh and Pearl Harbor, the Tet Offensive, Desert Storm, St. Mihiel, and even e-mails from Bosnia. Every war in our nation's history was represented.

I was only three years old when U.S. troops pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, and no one in my immediate family has ever served in the armed forces. Nothing I had ever seen, or read, or been told about war prepared me for what I received. I had braced myself for graphic descriptions of bloodshed and stories of brutality and suffering, and I suspected there would be intimate letters to wives and girlfriends written by forlorn soldiers who, in so many cases, later died in battle. What caught me off guard were the personal messages enclosed with every war letter:

"Dear Sir, Please accept these letters that my brother had written to my mother. My brother is missing (not a POW). He was never right after he returned home and one day he was just gone. I hope to make his life worth something. I miss him very much."

"I am a widow 85 years old and my husband and only son have passed. My husband served in Patton's Third Army. There is no one I can give these my husband's letters to so you may have them. Please remember him."

Please remember him. Time and time again, the writers pleaded with me to please remember.

Featuring two hundred of the more than 50,000 letters the Legacy Project has received to date, War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars, was born. Because we had promised that the Legacy Project would not profit from the letters sent, all of my earnings from the book are being donated to veterans groups.

We continue to solicit more letters and will eventually create a Web-based archive and distribute some of the original letters to appropriate museums and collections. Our true mission, though, is to prevent the disposal of this great, unknown literature of the American people. Please remember and acknowledge the veterans in your family or local community by protecting their letters or donating them to a reputable museum, archive, library, or historical society so that future generations will have access to and can learn from these irreplaceable documents. Together, we can keep these letters—which are truly the pages of our national autobiography—from disappearing forever.

The Armed Services Edition
As I mentioned earlier, Andrew recently launched a new initiative by taking a page from the past. In partnership with Washington Square Press (a division of Simon & Schuster) and the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), the Legacy Project recently announced the publication of the first Armed Services Edition (ASE) in fifty-five years. An ASE is a special version of a book, produced specifically to be given to veterans and active military personnel. Over 123 million were given away in the 1940s before they were discontinued in 1947. Andrew collects them and had wanted to bring back this idea for years.

Two million ASE versions of War Letters are now in the process of being distributed. Most will be sent by the VFW through the mail to veterans and family members of military personnel, but Andrew is also spending most of May and June traveling across the country handing out thousands of free copies on military bases. Once again, this is being done through Andrew's own money and private donations. He hopes to inspire the publication of other ASE versions of appropriate books such as Flags of Our Fathers, D-Day, and Black Hawk Down.

What You Can Do
As Memorial Day approaches, what better time to follow Andrew's lead by reflecting on the contributions of our military and making the commitment to honor those who have served? If you would like to learn how to preserve your own family's war letters or donate them to The Legacy Project, or simply want to know more about this remarkable ASE initiative, please visit The Legacy Project's website at: www.warletters.com