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. …

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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, …

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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 …

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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 …

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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.