It is May 12, 1968.

Larry Houck, a 24-year-old Marine helicopter pilot

aboard the USS Iwo Jima in the South China Sea,

is writing to a hometown buddy who also serves in Vietnam.

Below, an excerpt:

There’s been a lot of action up around here lately.

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It is July 16, 1863.

John Crawford is writing to his wife, Martha,

from a Confederate hospital in Winchester, Virginia,

where he is recovering from an illness contracted during the

Confederate retreat from Gettysburg.

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Reading the paper on February 22, 1943.

German tank and infantry battalions under General Erwin Rommel have captured the Kasserine Pass, a gap in the mountains of west Tunisia, in the first direct encounter between German and American forces in the war.

American defenders of the Pass suffered heavy losses and were forced to retreat fifty miles.

British armoured units have now joined with the Americans for a counter-attack and more heavy fighting is expected there in the coming days.

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It is June 4, 1940.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill is speaking in the House of Commons.

The nine-day operation to rescue British, French and Belgian soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk has concluded.

Eight hundred vessels braving German aircraft and underwater mines have brought 338,000 men to safety in England.

Thousands have been lost.

Thousands more have been left behind, to become Nazi prisoners.

Nine large vessels and two hundred small ones were also lost.

And the armies’ equipment — guns, tanks, cannons, trucks, motorcycles, ammunition, fuel and supplies — was left behind.

‘It was a colossal military disaster,’ Churchill says.

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It is February 25, 1956, the last day of the annual Communist Party conference in Moscow.

Fifteen hundred delegates from across the globe have gathered in a closed session to hear Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, deliver an unscheduled address.

Stalin has been dead for three years.

During his thirty-year rule, he was venerated as an all-knowing, all-powerful leader.

His image was everywhere, and public recitations of his greatness filled Soviet media:

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Life in 1990.

President George H.W. Bush, in his second year in office, is named Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year.”

Having launched the invasion of Panama in late 1989, Bush declares the operation a success with the detention of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, an operation which the UN and Organization for American States condemn as a violation of international law.

Iraq invades Kuwait, annexes it as an Iraqi province, and establishes a puppet government there, setting the stage for the first Gulf War in 1991.

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It is June 10, 1863.

Former Yale senior Matthew Miller, from Galena, Illinois, is writing a letter to his aunt from Milliken’s Bend, Mississippi, where he commands a Federal unit of Black troops.

Miller’s unit is one of several Federal units encamped there.

Their mission is to guard a depot supplying Grant’s troops who are besieging Vicksburg fifteen miles away.

Most of the troops guarding this Federal depot are Black men.

Many of them were enslaved laborers until just recently.

They have had little military training.

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Making cornbread.

“ALREADY had the night completed ten Of winter's hours, and by his crowing had The winged sentinel announced the day, When Symilus the rustic husbandman Of scanty farm, solicitous aboutThe coming day's unpleasant emptiness,

Doth slowly raise the limbs extended onHis pallet low, and doth with anxious handExplore the stilly darkness, groping forThe hearth which, being burnt, at length he finds.

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Reading the paper on February 15, 1943.

With the crumbling of the German line in the Soviet Union, reports say Hitler has relinquished his role as the supreme commander of the German army.

The job of planning Nazi military strategy in the east will be returned to field commanders, who have conditioned their acceptance on Hitler agreeing to the shortening of the German front and acknowledging responsibility for the ongoing German retreat.

Hitler had assumed command in December 1941, telling the Reichstag he did so based on his ‘intuition.’

Meanwhile, the German civilian population is being mobilized to counter the unrelenting advance of the Soviet army, which seems able to draw upon an unlimited supply of reserve troops.

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Carl Sandburg gets it.

Some of his words from 1936:

The people will live on.The learning and blundering people will live on.

They will be tricked and sold and again soldAnd go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,

The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,is a vast huddle with many units saying:

“I earn my living. I make enough to get by and it takes all my time.

“If I had more time I could do more for myself and maybe for others.

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