Wayne Karlin: The Lotus Eaters
And so he returned to Ithaca:
walked naked from the sea
and saw his shadow
fall on the white marble
Jennifer Brookland: Holding On When Leaving Feels Like Letting Go
I spent four years in the military and remember it in fuzzy flashes. The little I do recall leaves me with a vague sense of awkward incompetence, confusion, and shame.
Kimberly Parish Davis: Forever and Ever
…they watched television or surfed around the Internet for news about what was going on in Palestine. There had been a lot of fighting—a lot of bombed out buildings. One website told about the attack at the School where Hanna’s little brother was killed, and she was probably dealing with that while Emma was news surfing.
Andrea Mazzarino: War as Terrorism
As a Navy spouse of more than 10 years and a therapist who specializes in treating military families and those fleeing foreign wars, I believe that the post-9/11 wars have finally begun to come home in a variety of ways, including how we think about violence
Sydney Lea: Living History
I was not quite ten years old the day we traveled
To one site of the D-Day invasion nine years before.
I asked what the trouble was. His words sounded cryptic:
“We lost a lot of men here.”
Video: Souvenir Souvenir
Souvenir Souvenir tracks the efforts of the French filmmaker Bastien Dubois to learn more about his grandfather’s time as a French soldier in the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62). Sixty years later, that conflict is little-discussed by many of those who fought it, leaving members of younger generations, like Dubois, to speculate about their family’s role in the notoriously brutal war.
Richard Levine: Disturbing the Peace
“Do you want to know what war is about?”
Jake asked the talkative one.
“Don’t say it, Jake,” I said.
Richard Levine: One Night in America
The first time I noticed my hands
trembling, I was still a young man,
just returned from a war…
Video: My Journey from Marine to Actor — Adam Driver
Before he fought in the galactic battles of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Adam Driver was a United States Marine with 1/1 Weapons Company. He tells the story of how and why he became a Marine, the complex transition from soldier to civilian — and Arts in the Armed Forces, his nonprofit that brings theater to the military. Followed by a spirited performance of Marco Ramirez’s “I am not Batman” by Jesse J. Perez and Matt Johnson.
W. D. Ehrhart: Paul Fussell — A Remembrance
While Fussell wrote on a wide variety of subjects over his long life—ranging from Augustan humanism, Samuel Johnson, and Kingsley Amis to the 2nd Amendment, the Indianapolis 500, and travel in between-the-wars Europe—war, the irony of war, the suffering and lunacy and permanent damage of war, the unfairness of war, lay at the heart of his writing and of his being.
Barrett Swanson: The Soldier and the Soil
Their prose often stood head and shoulders above the standard freshman drivel, exhibiting a certain rigor of thought and depth of feeling that perhaps comes from having witnessed whole anthologies of trauma—entire villages razed by fire, wide-eyed children draped in gore, wives screaming beside mutilated husbands.
John Samuel Tieman: Alert
a night in a bunker when we were
kids in fatigues getting high
listening to Hendrix and the cassette stops
Chris Hedges: War and Memory
I asked my grandmother after he left what was wrong with him. “The war,” she said acidly.
Steve Nolan & NJ DeVico: The Orchestration Of War
Steve Nolan writes: It’s one of the most common souvenirs of war, the constant ringing in the ears, or, in my case, a high-pitched squeal presumably caused by the Blackhawk … Continue reading
Vox Populi 