Last Letters Home

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 they hadn't been before. The future is a dream.

Especially poignant among war letters are the last letters home. These messages may express many things--hope, pride, fear, exhaustion, love--but they take on an extraordinary new weight when the reader brings to them a foreknowledge of what has occurred. The letters in this LIFE book, from Robert Wise's comic pick-me-ups to his mom to Michelle Witmer's and Rachel Bosveld's dramatic 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 in Iraq. Beyond the statistics are these lives, bravely lived.

In Last Letters Home, fourteen families share their stories with LIFE's readers and come before LIFE's cameras, just as several of them participated in the HBO/New York Times project of the same name, which has produced a documentary to air on Veteran's Day, November 11. It took courage for them to publicly recall bygone sons, daughters, spouses and parents. Courage--theirs and the courage of those now departed--is on every page of this book.