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LETTERS FROM THE FRONT

June 15, 2007  

Last week I received emails from two friends serving in Iraq, one a Marine in Anbar Province, the other a civilian contractor in Baghdad. As I read them, I thought about all the letters from people on the front lines throughout history that still exist and wondered if today’s digital correspondence will last.

In the bottom drawer of my dresser I still have every letter I ever wrote to my mother from two tours in Vietnam. Before she died she gave them to me to save and pass on to my children. They will last as long as my children and their decedents preserve them.

Millions of letters from America’s wars alone exist in homes, museums, and archives. They survive for the simple reasons that they were written or typed in ink on paper and because people valued and saved them.

The technology of writing those letters was little different from that used by scribes who wrote letters for ancient Egyptian generals and by Roman soldiers who wrote to their families. Only the time it took to deliver a letter changed as the means of transportation improved. What took months or even years eventually took only a few days.

With the advent of email that time shrank from days to seconds. With cell phones and instant messaging we carry on conversations with people on the other side of the world. We even send digital images and videos. These are wonderful and marvelous things.

The price we pay for this ‘instant’ communication, however, is that the proliferation of messages and images it encourages makes each one less valuable. While exponentially more are written and sent, fewer are printed and saved; one good reason they are unlikely to last. Digital copies of messages and images from the front may indeed survive the ages, but don’t count on it.

We’ve all been told, “Be careful what you say in an email, once you hit the send button they live forever.” That only applies to the emails you really wish never existed in the first place. True, it actually requires special software to completely erase a file from a hard drive. But is there one of us who uses a computer who hasn’t irretrievably lost a file or an email we didn’t want to lose?

I remember an email sent to me in 1996 by an Air Force Major General stationed at our Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. It was priceless. He’d had an emergency root canal by an Egyptian dentist with no anesthetic. His sense of humor about the episode and his skillful writing made me laugh till I cried. His description of the pain was so vivid I felt it myself.

I failed to make a back-up copy, and when my computer crashed a few months later I lost it. He had moved on and I lost contact with him. Some historian or archeologist may discover this email on someone's hard drive several hundred years hence, but all I have is the memory of it, and that has faded with time.

We assume that advances in technology always make things better, more convenient, more efficient. All digital data is slaved to the software that enables it. Periodically that software is replaced by a newer version that’s not compatible with previous ones or it’s abandoned altogether. Remember 8-track stereo, Beta video, laser disks. Soon 525-line TV will be obsolete.

Just print it, you say! Convert that digital email or image to hard copy and you’ve solved the problem. Easy enough. But most people who save digital images and email on their computers in this day and age will end up with thousands. In two tours in Vietnam, I sent my mother and my wife no more than three or four-dozen letters. I took only a hundred or so pictures.

Now we save digital files on CDs, thumb drives, and iPods because it’s convenient. We print some of them. They’re easier to store and view electronically. Few of us give much though to whether or not the will have access to them 20 or 30 years from now. Incidentally, even digital images recorded on magnetic tape have a life span of about 30 years before the magnetic particles begin separating from the backing.

The tide of technological change is irreversible. Digital is here to stay. But the next time you or someone you know communicates from the front, I suggest a handwritten letter now and then. You’ll be surprised how much more you will value it.

Copyright © Edward W. Ross 2008 All Rights Reserved

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