NEWSWEEK: Special Issue: Voices of the Fallen

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NEWSWEEK: Special Issue: Voices of the Fallen
'Any day I'm here could be the day I die,' wrote Travis Youngblood, Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class

NEW YORK, March 25 /PRNewswire/ -- America's fallen warriors are garlanded and buried beneath white marble, revered but silenced. Yet they still have stories to tell, stories that bear hearing, and remembering, writes Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham in the issue on newsstands Monday. "In letters and journals and e-mails, the war dead live on, their words -- urgent, honest, unself- conscious -- testament to the realities of combat. What do they have to say to us? This special issue of Newsweek is an attempt to answer that question."

A team of correspondents and researchers collected the correspondence of American soldiers who served in Iraq and put them together in the April 2 issue, "Voices of the Fallen" (on newsstands Monday, March 26). Almost all of the magazine is devoted to the Voices project, which marks the beginning of the fifth year of war in Iraq. The accounts written were not for the public, but for those they loved -- wives, children, parents, siblings. "Each of the warriors whose words are excerpted died in the line of duty. Each of the families chose to share their stories with us, and with you," Meacham writes.

"It's become very important to me that these soldiers and Marines are viewed as individuals with lives, dreams, experiences and families," says Terri Clifton, whose son, Marine Cpl. Chad Clifton, was killed by a mortar in the Anbar province. "They aren't cardboard cutouts in shades of red, white and blue." Meacham writes that the families who cooperated with Newsweek did not do so to make political statements: their views are as divergent as the broad public's. "The point that united them is grief -- and the centrality of the human story of war."

The correspondences are broken up into four chapters:

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