Operation Homecoming

This sounds like a terrific idea. Troops who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan are encouraged by writers and poets to put their experience down in words:

The program, called "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience," is aimed at preserving stories from the battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan. The endowment expects to hold 20 or so workshops at American military installations between now and next spring (Camp Lejeune was the second stop; the first was Fort Drum in upstate New York in June), with a formidable roster of participating writers selected by an independent panel of editors appointed by the endowment. It includes military thriller heavyweights like Jeff Shaara and Tom Clancy, as well as prominent literary lights like Tobias Wolff and Richard Bausch.

The program, which will cost about $500,000, is being paid for almost entirely by the Boeing Company. And the Defense Department (an unlikely-seeming bedfellow for the endowment, which is also providing $1 million for a program that will take productions of Shakespeare to military bases) is providing logistical services.

This article is definitely worth reading. Go to bug me not if you aren't registered.

The New York Times > Books > Trying to Make the Pen as Mighty as the Sword