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.