While we were talking, my military escort arrived, and I had to cut our conversation short. As I stared out the open window of the Humvee, I thought of the longer reply I wish I could have given Ammar. I wanted him to know that I had launched an effort to preserve war letters, the Legacy Project, after a fire destroyed our family home in Washington, D.C., in 1989. Nothing was more devastating than losing all our personal correspondence, and it inspired in me a greater appreciation for letters and a desire to save them for posterity.

After a "Dear Abby" newspaper column announced the creation of the project nine years later, I was inundated with tens of thousands of American letters, including originals dating back to the Civil War. Yellowed with age, and often bundled together with frayed ribbons, many were fragile and required great care. It seemed impossible that these delicate pieces of paper could convey the fury and bloodshed of warfare.

But in countless letters, especially those written hastily in foxholes, trenches, and the bellies of warships, the faded words would suddenly flicker to life and describe a moment in time with breathless urgency. "Dear Sis: It is now 9:05 Sunday morning and we've been bombed now for over an hour," a sailor named William Czako wrote on December 7, 1941, from inside the U.S.S. New Orleans. "We were just struck by a bomb near the bow. I can hear the various stations screaming orders at one another. A man just brought us our gas masks." Letters like this represent the first, irreplaceable drafts of history—immediate, raw, unfiltered.

For years I traveled throughout the U.S. speaking with veterans, and time after time I heard the same appeal: Expand the project. Seek out letters by veterans from different nations. At the very least, they said, foreign war letters would offer a fresh perspective on familiar battles and historic events.

Before embarking on my global search, anti-American protests flared up around the world because of the war in Iraq. I braced myself for the possibility that in such a contentious atmosphere few people would be willing to assist me, and I would return empty-handed.

The response, in fact, was overwhelming. In every country people could not have been more hospitable or generous. Veterans shared letters they had not shown to their own families in years—if at all. Archivists spent days sifting through stacks of correspondence deep within their collections to find previously unpublished material. And my indefatigable guides scoured antique shops with me to salvage letters that might eventually have been thrown away.

The letters were breathtaking. We uncovered riveting accounts of the fighting at Verdun, Leningrad, Berlin, Pusan, Saigon, Sarajevo, and many other cities whose names are now synonymous with ferocious battles and sieges.