Last Letters Home By LIFE, HBO, and The New York Times From the show Meet the Heroes in the Headlines From The Publisher: War letters are, by their nature, intensely emotional, honest and heartfelt documents. They are letters like no others, written when the extreme peril of battle forces one to look at life in an entirely new way. Moments and memories are cherished with an urgency that hadn't been there before. The future is an elusive dream. Especially poignant among war letters are many things: Hope. Pride. Fear. Exhaustion. Love. But they take on an extraordinary new weight when the reader brings to them a knowledge of what has occurred. The letters in this LIFE book—from Robert Wise's comic pick-me-ups sent to his mom; to Michelle Witmer's and Rachel Bosveld's vivid accounts of action in Iraq; to Jesse Givens's passionate last words to his young family (a letter that he told his wife not to open unless he was killed)—give a thoroughly human face to the war. Beyond the statistics are these lives, bravely lived.		E-mail to a friend