pDuring World War II, nothing connected a serviceman and his sweetheart back home like a handwritten letter. It was a link to home-to the life a soldier had left behind. In Letters Home, Philip M. Coons shares the almost daily letters that his father, Harold M. Coons, wrote to his mother, Margaret Richman Coons, during basic training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina Camp Rucker, Alabama and his subsequent deployment with the United States Army's 66th Division to the European Theater of Operations. Comprised of more than 500 letters, Coons traces his father's remarkable journey from green soldier to seasoned vet and shares how this war affected the world on both a global and individual scale.p pAs part of the 66th Division, Coons crossed the Atlantic on the HMS Britannic, stopped for a short while in southeastern England, crossed the English Channel on Christmas Eve, 1944, and ended his journey in Brittany, France. Here the 66th guarded the German submarine base pockets at L'Orient and St.