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I N T R O D U C T I O N Leland Leland Duvall was nearly thirty-one years old when his draft notice arrived at his father’s farm in the mountain valley near the hamlet of Moreland, Arkansas, in March , three months after Pearl Harbor. While older men would be taken afterward, thirty-one was then the upper requirement for men to register for the draft. As the bloody Battle of the Bulge got underway in , Duvall would ruminate in a letter that older men like him who had long-settled habits before the war were more impervious to the life-changing horrors of battle than the young soldiers. It may be said that every man who fought and survived had entered that war as one person and emerged as quite another, even if limbs and mind were intact, and Duvall was no exception. For him, World War II changed everything, starting with the lifelong romance that the war engendered and that is recounted in these letters. Little about his life would resemble its existence before the war except the immutable tranquility that bore him through the hardships of the Great Depression, the war, and all the daily misfortunes of life. His self-description of a man of settled habits must have defined his emotional and social development, for it could not in any way describe the wayfaring life Duvall led before the war. He had very little formal education, and if itinerant farm labor can be called a career, it was the clearest path for a man with his upbringing in the hardest of times and the hardest of places, Depression Arkansas. His lack of schooling was not by choice. School at Moreland, such as it was, ended with the eighth 3-DUVALL_final_pages:Layout 1 9/16/11 10:33 AM Page ix grade. A youngster ambitious for more learning needed to go off and board at Atkins, a town of fourteen hundred that had a high school, but it was fifteen miles to the south of Moreland by dirt roads, which in the s might as well have been a hundred miles. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, farm boys like Duvall were expected to have acquired the muscle and agility to wrestle a mule and a doubleshovel plow along defined contours, which was all the job preparation they needed. Even Arkansas’s Depression governor, J. Marion Futrell, called high school a useless contrivance, a waste of taxpayers’ money. Duvall nevertheless wanted to go to high school and spent a few weeks boarding at Atkins. The next year, the nearer town of Hector started a high school, and each morning he walked three miles up the mountain road to Caglesville, where he caught a school bus to Hector. Each time, he ran out of money or enthusiasm after a few weeks and abandoned the project. Still, his thirst was so acute that he read every book that he could scavenge. A younger brother would recall Leland’s reading by candlelight or a coal-oil lamp far into the night from a pile of books—philosophy, history, economics , and fiction—that he obtained from lending libraries or from acquaintances. But a knowledge of Shakespeare, Kant, Dickens, or even Adam Smith would not put food on the table, so Duvall undertook a career as a farm laborer. Occasional trials with other forms of livelihood only proved the better dependability of agricultural work. Omer Duvall, Leland’s father, rented a few acres of farmland when he got married and then acquired forty acres of his own a half-mile from the crossroads community that called itself Moreland, where the rocky soil, though not like the deep, rich loam of the Mississippi Delta, could be massaged to produce a fair amount of cotton in a good season. Leland worked there and on other farms in the Arkansas River Valley. At his father’s insistence, he tried his hand at teaching grade school early in the Depression. Although he was fourteen and had only eight years of school, Duvall had traveled to Russellville in  with two women from the community who wanted to take the state teacher examination. He took the exam, too, and passed it with a high score, but the state school commissioner wrote on his exam certification that he was too young to be allowed to teach. At nineteen, he taught a term at Oak Grove, a community three miles east of Moreland, and a term...

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