Media Mix
Operation Homecoming
Edited by Andrew Carroll
In 2003, The National Endowment of the Arts – with extensive cooperation with the U.S. Armed Forces – established Operation Homecoming, an initiative based on the question “what would happen if the nation fostered a conversation between its writers and its troops?”
More than 6,000 troops attended writing seminars taught by American authors such as Tom Clancy, Tobias Wolff and Judith Ortiz Cofer, then put fingers to keyboard to write about their wartime experiences. The result was Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families, a collection of narratives, first-hand accounts, letters, e-mails and poems written by U.S. troops and their family members about the experience of war.
Whether it’s the pilot taking off and landing under hostile fire, the infantryman passing the time by watching Jeeps crash into stealth potholes or the Marine tasked to move a live IED into his truck only to be told to return it a moment later, readers are exposed to the reality of war in frank and sometimes amusing prose.
The heart of the book – and the toughest to get through – is the Worlds Apart section. Dedicated mainly to letters and journals of the families left behind in the states, these entries get to the real cost of war and show in detail the hardship, loneliness and heartbreak family members endure while their loved ones are on deployment. After reading a mother’s account of the weeks following the death of her son in Iraq, it’s hard to not pause a little longer after hearing about the latest war casualties on the nightly news.
Despite widely disparate views on the current wars taking place overseas, Americans have uniformly come together to support the troops serving on those missions. Operation Homecoming provides us with a small but profound glimpse at the sacrifice those men and women make on behalf of all Americans.
Have you read Operation Homecoming, or do you have a story of your own to share? Tell us more.