Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience Archives : Operation Homecoming:

Credits

[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.

James Salter On Writing

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. …

Louis Simpson On Military Experience

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, …

Richard Wilbur On Writing

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 …

Shelby Foote On Literary Influences

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 …

Tobias Wolff On Literary Influences

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.

Louis Simpson, “On The Ledge” (WWII)

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 …

Louis Simpson Recalls The Battle of the Bulge (WWII)

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 …

Marilyn Nelson, “Star-Fix” (WWII)

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 …

Richard Wilbur, “First Snow In Alsace” (WWII)

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. …