war narratives of soldiers

[darrels joy]

A new initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts which will help develop the war narratives of soldiers who saw the action first-hand, and the Washington Post had a report this week on it. The goal is to create a richer fabric of literature and history describing American men and women at war.


The National Endowment for the Arts will announce a program today to change that, to encourage troops returning from Iraq (and Afghanistan as well) to write about their experiences in wartime. "Operation Homecoming," which will be unveiled at a news conference at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial in Arlington, will make some of this country's most prominent authors available to servicemen and -women, for workshops and lectures intended to help them express and record what they have seen and felt in combat. The program is part oral history project, part literary talent search, and part a writing-as-therapy program for troops, particularly those in Iraq, who have been under extraordinary stress in America's first protracted and messy war since Vietnam.

The 16 writers who have agreed to participate by visiting military bases include Tobias Wolff, Tom Clancy, Victor Davis Hanson and McKay Jenkins. In addition, 10 other writers, including Shelby Foote and Richard Wilbur, have contributed reminiscences and readings to a compact disc and Web site the Endowment has produced.

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"These are not voices we would easily hear, otherwise," says Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA. They haven't been heard for a number of reasons, most important of which is that America's military men and women are preoccupied with fighting. Gioia also notes that one spur to the project is the realization that much of what is being said and recorded about the war is happening through e-mail, a medium that is more ephemeral than the letters and journals that captured the grit of military life in earlier conflicts.

"We want to connect with people when their stories are still fresh," says Jon Parrish Peede, one of the NEA's project directors for "Operation Homecoming." Peede compares the project to the artistic endeavors of the Depression-era Work Projects Administration. The NEA effort is a similar attempt to connect, artistically, with the broader American public during a time of national anxiety.

The goal of the project, beyond providing an emotional and expressive outlet for military personnel and their families, and getting the basic eyewitness facts of history down on paper, is to add to a long tradition of war literature. That tradition encompasses everything from the first great classic of Western literature, Homer's "Iliad," to the vast and ongoing production of new military memoirs, histories and novels that make up a healthy percentage of the American publishing industry.
Washington Post