The Monitor chronicles

the long version

"The Monitor Chronicles brings shipboard experience to life through the words of Civil War sailor George S. Geer, whose never-before-published letters home to his beloved wife, Martha, faithfully chronicle the events of that dramatic year. Like many men of his station, George S. Geer had joined Abraham Lincoln's navy less to help save the Union than to earn money and learn a reliable trade, so his accounts are unflinchingly honest - at times colored by the bravado of a man at war, at others tinged with the pathos of a man in danger and far from home."--BOOK JACKET.