Looking at war, in soldiers' words

The agency is the National Endowment for the Arts, directed by a poet named Dana Gioia. The project is Operation Homecoming, which reached out to those in the military and their families to send letters, poems, eyewitness accounts, diary entries, song lyrics, memoirs, short fiction, and other writings that would illuminate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from every aspect imaginable -- in battle, on US military bases, waiting at home for loved ones to return. The Defense Department did not intervene, and nobody censored anything to hide or sugarcoat the horrors of these discretionary wars.

The idea for the unprecedented project began at an April 2003 meeting of state poet laureates. Marilyn Nelson, Connecticut's most visible poet, talked about the pressures of war on families. She suggested that writers reach out to those in the military and those related to those in the military. As Gioia asks in the preface, "What would happen if the nation fostered a conversation between its writers and its troops?"

Combining federal funds and a grant from the Boeing aircraft corporation, the NEA sent accomplished writers to military venues to stimulate the desire to write, and to provide instruction about how to write well. Those writers are listed in the front of the anthology. They include Mark Bowden, Tom Clancy, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Tobias Wolff.

When the workshops started and the writing submissions began to flow in, what the organizers thought might be a trickle ended up as a flood. When the flood abated, about 2,000 pieces of writing had arrived. The book includes 100, chosen after careful deliberation by a panel of professional writers.