[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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
