The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to present Operation Homecoming, writing the wartime experience. This unique literary program is aimed at preserving the stories and reflections of American troops who have served our nation, both on the frontlines in Afghanistan and Iraq, and stateside, defending the homeland. The Arts Endowment is sponsoring a series of writing workshops on U.S. military installations at home and abroad for returning troops and their families, taught by some of America’s most distinguished novelists, poets, historians, and journalists. These workshops will provide servicemen and women with the opportunity to write about their wartime experiences in a variety of forms, from fiction, verse and letters to essay, memoir and personal journal. The visiting writers, many of whom … Listen…
War and military service have been major literary subjects as long as there has been literature. The earliest masterpiece of the Western tradition. Homer’s Iliad, portrays the heroism and human cost of the Trojan War, while its companion poem, The Odyssey recounts one veteran’s long and difficult homecoming. The great national epics, from the Aeneid of Imperial Rome to the Shahnameh of medieval Persia mostly commemorate the decisive military encounters that shaped each cultures history. Many great authors have also been soldiers. The Greek playwright Sophocles, creator of Oedipus Rex, served as an Athenian general in the Peloponnesian War. The Roman poet Horus fought at the Battle of Philippi. Shakespeare’s friend and fellow playwright Ben Jonson served in the infantry in the Flemish … Listen…
Throughout history, the sailors life has always involved risk and peril. In World War one. A terrible new danger was introduced. The submarine attack. In the following letter, a young Navy sailor from Texas, Hugh Alexandra Leslie, tells his family about the sinking of the USS President Lincoln. Actor Edward Giraud reads a selection from Leslie’s June 1917 letter. My dearest and beloved parents and brothers and sisters, I received your most kind and appreciated letters since I hit the old USA. Again, I suppose you read about us losing our good ship Lincoln by two torpedoes from an enemy sub. Also, the lives of 24 of our shipmates. I sent you a telegram as soon as I drove in New York. I … Listen…
Hazel Jane Raines perfected her piloting skills as a barnstormer in Georgia air shows during World War Two. Raines first served the Allied cause as an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot for the RAF in England. When the U.S. military finally accepted women pilots. Raines returned to the states and joined the Wasps, pulling targets for gunnery trainees, a pilot of extraordinary skill. Raines flew 44 types of airplanes and was the first female reserve pilot called to active duty during the Korean War. Here, Diane Cooper Gould reads from Raines letters home from wartime England. Sunday morning, March 28th, 1943. Dearest mother. Now that it’s all over, I’ll tell you all about a funny experience I had sometime ago. I would have told … Listen…
Whether sent by email from a Navy carrier today or by a letter courier in the American Revolution. Love letters home are a constant across the centuries. Writing his wife in June 1863, Samuel Campbell of the Massachusetts 55th Volunteer Infantry expresses his love for his family and his determination to end slavery here. Ed Bishop reads the escaped slaves letter home. June 1863. Dear wife, I have enlisted in on. I am now in the state of Massachusetts. But before this letter reaches you, I will be in North Carolina. And though great is the present national difficulties, yet, I look forward to a brighter day when I should have the opportunity. A career in the full enjoyment of freedom. I would … Listen…
Major Sullivan Ballou was in his early 30s when he joined the Union Army’s Rhode Island Volunteers. At the outbreak of the Civil War. Actor Edward Jarrow reads from Major Blue’s now famous letter to his wife. July 14th, 1861. Washington, D.C. my very dear Sarah, the indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days, perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more. Our movement may be one of a few days duration, and full of pleasure, and it may be one of severe conflict and death to me, not my will, but thine. Oh, God, be … Listen…
Shelby Foote served in the U.S. Army in the Marine Corps during World War Two. In this selection from his Civil War novel Shiloh, he follows one Confederate soldier into battle. When we were halfway up the rise. I began to see black shapes against the rim where it sloped off shore. At first I thought they were scarecrows. They look like scarecrow. That didn’t make sense. Except they look so black and stick like. Then I saw them move and wiggling and a rim broke out with smoke, some of it going straight up and some jet and jaw. It all lined rolling and jumpers pitch up from east in the north. I’m in like walks past my ears. I thought aloud … Listen…
Bobby Ann Mason’s famous first novel, In Country, explored the public reaction to the Vietnam War and its veterans in the mid 1980s. The novel’s protagonist, Sam, is a 15 year old girl whose father was killed in the war. In this excerpt from the end of the novel, Sam makes a pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. to visit the Vietnam War Memorial with her grandmother, mama, and her uncle Emmett, who was also a veteran. Here, take the camera, Sam, get his name. Mama has brought Donna’s Instamatic. No, I can’t take a picture this close. Sam climbs the ladder until she’s eye level with her father’s name. She feels funny, touching it and scratching on a rock. Writing something for future archeologists … Listen…
Barry Hanna is recognized as one of our nation’s finest contemporary writers. Here, Hannah reads an excerpt from his story Testimony of Pilot. Who had Barry escorted B-52s on bombing missions in North Vietnam. He was catapulted off the bottom. Richard in his suit at 100 degrees temperature, often at night, and put the F-4 when all it could get. The tiny cockpit, the immense, long, $2 million fuselage, wings, tail and jet engine quad. Barry, the genius master of his Dragon flying up to 20,000ft, had to be cool. All his trips want this easy. He’d have to blast out in daytime and get with a B-52s, and a Sam missile would come up among them. Two of his mates were taken … Listen…
Award winning novelist James Salter. From fighter jets in World War Two and the Korean War. In this selection, from his memoir Burning the Days. Salter describes a dogfight with a MiG in Korea. The first good weather in a week. The fighter bombers are going north again in strength. To someplace up near the border. The briefing room is crowded and electric. It’s max effort. Everything they can fly. 600 enemy aircraft have encountered on their fields. We’re sending up 40 far beneath us. The silver formations were moving slowly, it seemed. Across barren hills. Enemy flights were being announced. One after another. And then someone saw them along the river at 30,000ft. Blood jumping after the idle days, we dropped tanks … Listen…
Vietnam War veteran Tobias Wolff translated his military experiences into an acclaimed memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army. I was sent off to language school to learn Vietnamese. I was gone for over a year, 13 months, and I was in civilian status that whole time. I never went to a base. That was how I spent the 13 months before I left for Vietnam. And that’s what begins this passage. Here is my orders for Vietnam. And then my year of grace ended at the end of it. Scared, short winded, forgetful of all martial skills and disciplines. I was promoted to first lieutenant and posted back to Fort Bragg to await orders. Just after I got there, I was assigned to a training … Listen…
In World War II, two young American men who had never traveled a hundred miles from their homes suddenly found themselves thousands of miles from their own nation. Private Will Campbell was one such soldier, known today as a courageous minister in the civil rights movement and award winning author. Campbell enlisted in the army at 18 and was stationed at Saipan as a medic. Here, Campbell relates his experience crossing the Pacific in a Liberty ship. It was December 1943, and we were on a crowded troopship bound for the South Pacific. Most of us were in our teens, seasick, homesick, and a little afraid. I had asked my best pal, Herman Hyman, what he was going to send his girlfriend for … Listen…
Will Campbell also had the unique experience of seeing the return of the Enola Gay after its fateful bombing run over Hiroshima. So I was on side panel know when the war ended. In fact, I saw the Enola Gay land. I didn’t we didn’t know what had happened, but we knew something big had happened because our CEO, Oliver, said he didn’t know what it was, but he knew it was something very unusual. And. And the next day we heard that they’d dropped the first atomic bomb. We never heard of atomic bomb. Course. And, because we were when we saw the plane come in, we would go out every afternoon and watch them come back from their bombing raids. And … Listen…
Classics professor and military historian Victor Davis. Hanson has written extensively about ancient Greek and modern warfare. His uncle, who was also his namesake, fought and died in World War II, two intent on uncovering the last moments of his uncle’s life. Hanson was surprised to find several living members of the 29th Marines in the sixth Marine Division, which had taken heavy casualties at Okinawa. Here is an excerpt from one of his many correspondences with his uncle’s former comrades. Dear Victor, you simply must overlook the blatant familiarity reflected in this salutation. I plead only the overwhelming emotion with which I’ve been attempting to cope for the last 40 hours since the arrival of your startling letter. Thank you for enabling … Listen…
Former US Poet laureate Richard Wilbur saw ferocious combat in both Italy and France as an infantryman during World War Two. Here is Wilbur describing the genesis of one wartime poem. After we had done the Southern France invasion. We worked our way up through France to Alsace, where we experienced an unusually bitter winter. And this poem, of course, comes out of that first snow in Alsace. The snow came down last night like more burned on the moon. It fell till dawn. Covered the town with simple clubs. Absolute snow. Lies rumpled on what shell bursts scattered and deranged and tangled railings for a vast lawn. As if it did not know they’d changed. Snow smoothly clasps the roofs of homes. … Listen…
Poet Marilyn Nelson was raised on military bases and developed a unique literary perspective as a daughter of a Tuskegee Airman. Here, Nelson reads from the fields of praise. Star fix for Melvin M Nelson, captain, United States Air Force, retired 1917 to 1966 at his cramped desk under the Astrodome. The navigator looks thousands of light years everywhere but down. He gets a celestial fix. Measuring headwinds, checking the log, plotting wind speed, altitude, mood drift in a circle of protractors slide rules and pencils. He charts in his how goes it? The points of no alternate and of no return. He keeps his eyes on the compass. The two altimeters, the map he thinks. Do we have enough fuel? What if … Listen…
Pulitzer Prize winning poet Louis Simpson served in the 101st Airborne Division in World War Two, and has written memorably about his experience in one of the war’s bloodiest. Battles in the battle of the Bulge at Bastogne. I remember it vividly as though someone were putting on an enormous panorama for me. I’m grateful to have seen it. A horizon ringed with fire here and there, and the outfit to which I belong in the middle of that, and being threatened with annihilation. And to me it was in retrospect, not not when it was actually going on. So much. It seemed to me that it was like an enormously planned thing to look at. And of course, I was glad when … Listen…
On the ledge. I can see the coast coming near one of our planes. A thunderbolt. Plunging down and up again. Seconds later we heard the rattle of machine guns. That night we lay among hedgerows. The night was black. There was thrashing in a hedgerow. A burst of firing in the morning. A dead cow. A plane droned overhead. One of theirs diesel with a rhythmic sound. Then the bombs came whistling down. We were strung out on an embankment. Side by side. In a straight line. Like infantry in World War One. Waiting for the whistle to blow. The Germans knew we were there. And were firing everything they had. Bullets passing right above. I knew that in a moment the … Listen…
Here, Tobias Wolff discusses his literary influences and his youthful attraction to military service. This wasn’t a new idea. The Army I’d always known I would wear the uniform. It was essential to my idea of legitimacy. The men I I’d respected when I was growing up had all served, and most of the writers I looked up to. Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Erich Maria Remarque, and of course, Hemingway, to whom I turn for guidance in all things. Military service was not an incidental part of their histories. They were unimaginable. Apart from it.
Shelby Foote learned his craft from past masters of European and American literature. Well, the writers have influenced me as a writer, never mind the war. Anything else, of course, influenced me most. Proust and Faulkner, French are two big influences in my life, and they influence the way I write about war. But the one who influenced me to write about war will probably Tolstoy certainly. And before Tolstoy, all, sizable influence me all to the good, I think, because they had the right idea, which turned out which was the first really communicated confusion of war. it’s about a war, but you don’t know whether it’s war or not. They don’t realize that he’s saying that he wrote Napoleon after all … Listen…
Here again is Richard Wilbur. Well, I think that if you’re a soldier existing under combat conditions or threatened with combat conditions, you are going to feel rather disrupted. you’ll be disrupted by, fear and uncertainty. And this simply the strange ness of fighting a war and writing poems is a way, a small way of putting some of your life and mind in order. I think that’s why I turned most seriously to, poetry at that time. I suppose it might also be said that if you’re sitting in a foxhole, as I was quite a bit at the time, and worrying a bit about what’s going on around you, writing a poem can have a marvelously insulating effect. It can take … Listen…
Here again is Louise Simpson speaking about military experience. Most of the hard and dangerous work of the world is done by such men. During the war, I learned to respect them and have done so ever since. I have earned my living by teaching in universities. The people around me, with a few exceptions, could not understand the basis of my thought that words to me were pale in comparison with experience mattered only insofar as they transmitted experience. One evening at dinner in New York, a woman told me that she thought it terrible that I, a poet, had been in the war. She had a son who was about to enter Columbia, and he would never take up arms. No, … Listen…
Here again. James Salter. In 1939. The war had broken out, and by 1941, we were in at. I ended up at West Point. The old life vanished. The new one had little use for poetry. I did read and as an upperclassman wrote a few short stories. I had seen some in the Academy magazine and felt I could do better. And after the first one, the editor asked for more. When I became an officer, there was at first no time for writing, nor was there the privacy. Beyond that was a greater inhibition. It was alien to the life I’d been commissioned in the Army Air Force and in the early days, with the transport pilot later switching into jets. … Listen…
[Piano Music] Operation homecoming is presented by the National Endowment for the Arts in conjunction with the Southern Arts Federation. This historic program would not have been possible without the generous support of the Boeing Company. The musical personnel includes Dan Sherrod on accordion, Richard Dorsey and Philip Brunelle on piano, and Vietnam veteran Saul Brody on harmonica. This audio CD was produced and directed by Dan Stone and John Parrish, P.T. of the National Endowment for the Arts. This is Dana Gioia.
