The Letter Home

Decker's debut, styled as an illustrated letter from an American medic to his child at the end of WW I, indicates the difficulties of explaining war to a young audience. Scant background is provided—readers never hear who is fighting whom, or why—but the title page vaguely announces a setting (Europe, 1918), and the letter-writer is recognizable by his Red Cross armband and lack of a rifle. Terse words and pictures of icy weather convey his physical coldness and raw boredom, although he rarely speaks of his medical duties. One pen-and-ink drawing appears per page, a postcard-size rectangle captioned with an oblique statement about what he has endured. The medic remembers his infantry's march to the front lines, passing beneath American and French flags. On a stark, barbed-wire-strewn battlefield ("Some nights were alive with fireworks"), a soldier peeks out of a sandbagged trench as white explosions crack the sky. "Sometimes we played hide and seek," says the medic ingenuously, as he and others evade shadowy armed figures. The soldiers' bland faces, with no mouths, eyes turned down at the corners, convey dejection, and some details recall antiwar novels such as Slaughterhouse-Five ("Hendricks found a woman's coat. We all laughed.... He said that it kept him warm"). Yet the medic's "prayer" as his ship glides toward the Statue of Liberty ("Compassion as action to ease the pain of the world ") remains as enigmatic as the situation. The retrospective "letter," which alludes to death while remaining nonjudgmental, implies the painful realities that adults try to withhold from children. All ages. (Nov.)