Operation Desert Storm correspondence

This letter was sent by Marine Corps Major Reina M. DuVal to a friend back home in Maryland while stationed in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm. In the three-page, double-sided, handwritten letter she shares her thoughts on the purpose and course of the war. She condemns the actions of Saddam Hussain, describes her role with the Marines and talks of her willingness to continue fighting to get rid of tyrants. Interspersed with this are lighter comments on the youth of her companions and the spectacle of the extreme weather conditions.

This letter demonstrates the continued importance of mail call in the morale of modern warfare. In it DuVal talks openly about how military personnel live for mail call and how they appreciate the people who take the time to write and connect them with reality. The Gulf War saw an outpouring of public letter writing to service men and women through ‘Any Serviceman’; a program designed to allow the public to express their appreciation to service personnel they had never met.

Operation Desert Storm posed a considerable challenge to the Postal Service and Military Postal Service Agency. Military personnel in the Persian Gulf equaled that of the entire population of Wyoming and they were 8,000 miles away from the United States in an area the size of Alaska. Despite the difficulties these logistics posed, 60 million pounds of mail had been delivered to deployed personnel during the Gulf War.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Smithsonian National Postal Museum. Released by the Smithsonian Institution under CC0 through Smithsonian Open Access.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.