With phone and internet technology, it’s easy to look back at the recent years of our lives in great detail. The more distant past is harder. There may be fragments-a photo, a news clipping, a family story-but rarely is there enough to recapture what it really felt like in that other time.

Unless, like a young Jim Hubbard, you mailed a letter home every week or two, from the time you left your Michigan home for college in 1961 until you returned from the Vietnam War in late 1968, and your parents and wife saved them all, and your daughter chanced upon them in a bag half a century later.

The result is a treasure, an honest and often humorous time capsule of study and play at three Michigan colleges; of family, love, and marriage; and of the political and cultural touchstones that shaped the ‘60s-especially the Vietnam War during a year that changed everything for Captain Hubbard and his country. For military and social history buffs, for veterans and their families, and for readers of a certain age, Jim’s letters open a window to a bygone era.