Smithsonian Magazine - 11.2019

20 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019

VETERANS

prologue

30 percent of the collection has been processed, ac-

cording to Charlene Baldwin, the library dean.

And the letters keep coming in. Two years ago,

again with the Dear Abby column’s help, Carroll

relaunched his collection eff ort, rebranding it the

Million Letters Campaign to underline the urgency.

The last veterans of World War I have died and those

who served in World War II are in their 90s; will their

descendants value the letters? Carroll also worries

about the stories service members send home from

the United States’ current wars. There may be some-

thing precious about an old letter, but emails and

texts, which he also collects, are not given the same

reverence. Since 2017, Carroll estimates the archive

has grown to about 150,000 letters. The bespectacled

academic is a fast-talking optimist, but even he seems

momentarily cowed by the archive’s potential size:

“There’s millions more out there,” he says.

As if to prove his point, Carroll pries open a large

cardboard box sent to his apartment from Wiscon-

sin. Inside is a vintage suitcase, and when he pops

the latches, he reveals hundreds more letters. A note

explains that these are the stories of First Lt. Edward

Lynch; his nephew John Pietrowski sent them. The

suitcase had been sitting in Pietrowski’s mother’s

attic all his life, but it wasn’t until after she died in

2010 that Pietrowski began to read Uncle Eddie’s

stories. “It was like a book I couldn’t put down,”

Pietrowski says of Lynch’s adventures in his P-

Mustang during World War II. Lynch had written to

his father—a World War I veteran and Pietrowski’s

grandfather—almost every day to tell him of fl ying

over “The Hump,” the nickname WWII pilots had

given the dangerous expanse of the Himalayas, and

buzzing the Taj Mahal. Lynch died at the stick of a

fi ghter jet in a crash in Illinois in 1948, years before

Pietrowski was born, but reading the letters, he says,

“I felt really close to him.” Pietrowski, now retired

and without children of his

Along with hun-

dreds of letters

from First Lt.

Edward Lynch

(pictured), his

family donated

the wallet and

watch he carried

when his plane

crashed.

Archivists

discovered a

WWI missive

that mentions, in

startling detail,

the wounds

suff ered by a

then-unknown

Illinois man

named Ernest

Hemingway. CONTINUED ON PAGE 88