Fighting Words

I come away from this article in the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine with mixed feelings. As one who does like to write, the act of writing can be a release, can provide time to collect ones thoughts, structure them for consumption by others. Hence, I applaud the work underway by the National Endowment for the Arts: Operation Homecoming. I recognize this won't work for everyone. But the process should be a good start.

"To my knowledge," says NEA chairman Dana Gioia, himself a poet, "this is the only program like this in history that happened right when the event was going on."

Gioia hatched the idea for Operation Homecoming almost two years ago over drinks at a New Hampshire tavern with an old friend, Marilyn Nelson, who is Connecticut's poet laureate and the daughter of a career Air Force officer. Part of that discussion, says Nelson, "was about the course I taught at West Point, `Poetry and Meditation,' and part was about the teaching I'd done at the Joiner Center at UMass-Boston, which was founded for Vietnam vets. A lot of the vets in the program suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder - people who were waking and having screaming nightmares about things that happened 40 years ago, and I suspect that's because they didn't get them out - and several of the ideas [Gioia and I] were tossing back and forth was if it might be possible for the soldiers of this generation to avoid that by having something like what was happening in my class."

My father was a veteran of Iwo Jima as a member of the US Marines 4th Division. He did not (and still does not) like to talk much about his time there. I respect that. My daughter, Allison, had the opportunity to read Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima by James Bradley. She got me interested, very easily I would add, as I have always wanted to know more about Iwo Jima. We in turn, obtained a copy for Dad. After completing the book, he said that the real heroes of Iwo were those who did not come home.

One of the family's good friends, a long time neighbor and former classmate of Allison, is now at West Point, part of the Long Grey Line as a member of the Class of 2008. Who knows what his opportunity to serve will be when his time comes?

As Operation Homecoming continues to evolve, one can hope that the program will be an enabler for the successful return of these current day heroes.