From the early 1960s through March 1973
hundreds of thousands of men and women served in
Vietnam, in an undeclared and highly controversial war.
During the peak years of that conflict, from May 1968
through December 1972, a young reporter, Nancy E. Lynch,
relayed the hopes and fears, the joy and the tears, of
hundreds of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines from
Delaware through the Vietnam Mailbag column she wrote in
the Wilmington Morning News.
At the start, Nancy wrote one column a week. As the
mailbag filled at an ever faster pace, she progressed to
two columns a week, and then to three. No matter how
much she wrote, there never seemed to be room to tell
all the stories.
But Nancy kept all those letters, and the pictures sent
with many of them, neatly folded in their original
envelopes. Now, nearly 40 years after she began writing
her column, Nancy is reopening the Vietnam Mailbag to
give a new generation a fresh look at the first-person
accounts of troops in the combat zone.
In countless ways, the Vietnam War transformed American
society, and the experience of serving in this unpopular
conflict would have an equally profound impact on the
lives of the men and women who served there.
In Vietnam Mailbag: Voices From the War, 1968-1972,
Nancy tells the story of troops at war — through
the letters they wrote to her a generation ago and
through a series of moving interviews with veterans who
now share their views on how the Vietnam experience
shaped their lives.
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