I

National Endowment for the Arts

National Endowment for the Arts
Here is my father, I said.

He is the most identifiable

of the six figures, the only

one whose profile is visible.

But for half a century he was

almost completely silent

about Iwo Jima. To his wife of

forty-seven years he spoke

about it only once, on their

first date. It was not until

after his death that we

learned of the Navy Cross.

In his quiet humility he kept

that from us.Why was he so

silent? I think the answer is

summed up in his belief that

the true heroes of Iwo Jima

were the ones who didn’t

come back.

–– James Bradley
National Endowment for the Arts
ii

Operation Homecoming is presented by the National Endowment for the Arts 

in cooperation with the Southern Arts Federation. 

Operation Homecoming is made possible by The Boeing Company.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), established by Congress in 1965 as an

independent federal agency, is the official arts organization of the United States

government. As the largest annual funder of the arts in the country, the NEA is dedicated

to supporting excellence in the arts — both new and established, bringing the arts to all

Americans, and providing leadership in arts education. Through its grants and programs,

the NEA brings great art to all 50 states and six U.S. jurisdictions, including rural areas,

inner cities, and military bases. 

The Boeing Company is the world’s leading aerospace company. It is the largest 

manufacturer of satellites, commercial jetliners, and military aircraft. The company is also 

a global market leader in missile defense, human space flight, launch services, aerospace

support services, and homeland security services. As a leading contractor to the U.S.

Department of Defense, Boeing works together with its DoD customers to provide U.S.

Armed Forces and its allies around the world with fully integrated, high-performing 

systems solutions and support.

The Southern Arts Federation (SAF) is a nonprofit regional arts organization that has been

making a positive difference in the arts throughout the South since 1975. SAF creates 

partnerships and collaborations; assists in the professional development of artists, arts

organizations and arts professionals; presents, promotes and produces Southern arts and

cultural programming; and advocates for the arts and art education. The organization works

in partnership with the state arts agencies of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky,

Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. 

Additional copies of this publication can be ordered either on the 

NEA Web site at www.arts.gov or the Operation Homecoming Web site at 

www.operationhomecoming.org. 

This publication is published by:

National Endowment for the Arts

1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20506-0001

(202) 682-5400

Voice/TYY: 

(202) 682-5496 

For individuals who are deaf or hard-of-hearing.

Individuals who do not use conventional print may contact 

the Arts Endowment’s Office for AccessAbility to obtain this 

publication in an alternate format. Telephone: (202) 682-5532

Design by Fletcher Design, Inc./Washington, D.C.

This publication was printed on recycled paper.
iii

Contents

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience...............iv

Writers participating in base workshops

Richard Bausch ...................................................................................................1

Mark Bowden......................................................................................................2

Tom Clancy..........................................................................................................3 

Judith Ortiz Cofer ...............................................................................................4

Joe Haldeman......................................................................................................5

Barry Hannah ......................................................................................................6

Victor Davis Hanson...........................................................................................7

Andrew Hudgins.................................................................................................8

McKay Jenkins.....................................................................................................9

Bobbie Ann Mason ...........................................................................................10

James McBride..................................................................................................11

Marilyn Nelson..................................................................................................12

Wyatt Prunty......................................................................................................13

Dan Rifenburgh ................................................................................................14

Jeff Shaara..........................................................................................................15

Tobias Wolff ......................................................................................................16

Writers participating on CD or Web site

James Bradley....................................................................................................17

Will D. Campbell..............................................................................................17

Andrew Carroll..................................................................................................18

Shelby Foote......................................................................................................18

Yusef Komunyakaa............................................................................................19

Erin McGraw.....................................................................................................19

James Salter .......................................................................................................20

Louis Simpson...................................................................................................20

William Jay Smith..............................................................................................21

Richard Wilbur..................................................................................................21

Operation Homecoming Anthology..........................................................22

National Endowment for the Arts
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National Endowment for the Arts

Operation Homecoming:

Writing the Wartime Experience

by Dana Gioia

Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to present Operation 

Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, a program for U.S. 

military personnel and their families. This unique literary program is

aimed at preserving the stories and reflections of American troops who have

served our nation on the frontlines –– as in Afghanistan and Iraq –– and stateside 

defending the homeland.

In coordination with all four branches of the Armed Forces and the

Department of Defense, the Arts Endowment is sponsoring writing workshops

for returning troops and their families at military installations from Alaska to

Florida, New York to California, and numerous sites in between. The workshops

also will be held at overseas bases. Taught by some of America’s most 

distinguished novelists, poets, historians, and journalists, these workshops will 

provide service men and women with the opportunity to write about their

wartime experiences in a variety of forms — from fiction, verse, and letters to 

essay, memoir, and personal journal. The visiting writers, many of whom are war 

veterans themselves, will help the troops share their stories with current and

future generations. 

To give our troops a sense of their own capabilities, the Arts Endowment 

has also produced an accompanying audio CD for this program. Moving from a

heart-rending letter from the Civil War to poems and memoirs about World War

II to Vietnam War fiction, the CD explores the variety of literary responses by

those who have come through similar experiences.

In addition to the multi-day workshops and audio CD, the Arts Endowment

will provide an online writing tutorial to help the troops develop their writing

skills and access writing resources. The Web site also will be used to collect 

submissions of writing by active personnel and their families. The best writing that

emerges from this program will be published in a nationally promoted anthology

of wartime writing that will be sold in bookstores and will be distributed free by

the Arts Endowment to military installations, schools, and libraries.

It is impossible to predict what stories will appear in this anthology. Much 

of it may be personal in importance — a soldier’s or spouse’s attempt to capture

and clarify a singularly challenging moment in life. Some of it may rise to 

literature — vivid accounts of experience that arrest the reader’s attention and

linger in the memory. All of it will have historical value as the testimony of men

and women who saw the events directly. Operation Homecoming will capture

these individual accounts and preserve them for the public record. American 

letters will be richer for their addition.

Photo by Vance Jacobs
v

National Endowment for the Arts

War and military service have been major literary subjects as long as there has

been literature. The earliest masterpiece of the Western tradition, Homer’s

Iliad, portrays the heroism and human cost of the Trojan War, while its companion

poem, The Odyssey, recounts one veteran’s long and difficult homecoming. The

great national epics of imperial Rome (The Aeneid), France (The Song of Roland),

Spain (El Cid), and Persia (The Shahnama) all commemorate the decisive military

encounters that shaped each culture’s history.

Many great authors have been soldiers. The Greek playwright Sophocles, 

creator of Oedipus Rex, served as an Athenian general in the Peloponnesian War. 

The Roman poet Horace fought at the Battle of Philippi. Shakespeare’s friend and

fellow playwright Ben Jonson served in the infantry in the Flemish Wars. The two

Renaissance poets who first brought the sonnet to English — Sir Thomas Wyatt and

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey — both were soldiers. Other great writers have 

continued this tradition from Spain’s Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, 

to Russia’s Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace.

War also has inspired its civilian witnesses to great literature. Tending to 

wounded Union soldiers in the makeshift hospitals of Washington, D.C., the poet

Walt Whitman wrote about the devastation of the American Civil War with heartfelt

understanding. During World War I, Ernest Hemingway served as a volunteer

ambulance driver for the American Red Cross on the Austro-Italian front and 

was hospitalized with shrapnel injuries. He fictionalized his war experiences in his

novel A Farewell to Arms. While many American writers served in World War I, 

few participated in sustained combat, and their writing reflects this absence. For

most of them, the war was a great storm in the distance that rolled past without 

ever touching down.

But World War II was different. For millions of Americans, the war was long,

bloody, and personal. Many of our greatest contemporary poets saw brutal combat

and later wrote movingly about their wartime experience, including Pulitzer Prize

winners, Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov, Louis Simpson, and Richard Wilbur.

Other American writers served their nation on the dangerous wartime seas, either in

the U.S. Navy, like poet William Jay Smith, or in the U.S. Merchant Marine, like

novelist Ralph Ellison. Our novelists in uniform also addressed war in their best

works, especially James Dickey, Shelby Foote, Joseph Heller, James Jones, John

Oliver Killens, Norman Mailer, James Salter, and Kurt Vonnegut. The pattern

repeated with the Vietnam War, producing such singular literary talents as Philip

Caputo, Joe Haldeman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Tim O’Brien, Robert Stone, and 

Tobias Wolff.

One cannot tell the story of our nation without also telling the story of our wars.

And these often harrowing tales are best told by the men and women who lived

them. Today’s American military is the best trained and best educated in our nation’s

history. These men and women offer unique and important voices that enlarge 

our understanding of the American experience. Looking at the great literary legacy

of soldier writers from antiquity to the present, I cannot help but expect that

important new writers will emerge from the ranks of our latest veterans.★

Richard Bausch

Richard Bausch was one of twin boys born in Fort

Benning, Georgia, in 1945 (his twin brother,

Robert, is also a novelist). When he was three,

his family moved to the Washington, D.C. suburbs. He

and Robert served in the U.S. Air Force between 1966-

1969, after which Richard roamed the Midwest and

South playing guitar and singing in a rock band, and

writing poetry. He went on to receive a B.A. from

George Mason University and an M.F.A. in creative

writing from the University of Iowa. Bausch is the

author of nine novels and five collections of short stories,

including Take Me Back (1981), which was nominated

for the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Last Good Time

(1984); Mr. Field’s Daughter (1989); Violence (1992); In

the Night Season (1998); The Gypsy Man (2003); and

The Stories of Richard Bausch (2003). His short stories

have appeared in numerous prize-winning anthologies,

including Best American Short Stories, O. Henry, and

Pushcart. He has received several awards, including 

a National Endowment for the Arts Literature

Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila

Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, and the Award

in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters. He

is Professor of English and Heritage Chair of Creative

Writing at George Mason University.★

He left a pause. He might have

been considering telling her

everything about himself.

Then he said, ‘Like most

military people, I hate war.

But there are tigers in the

world, you know.’

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National Endowment for the Arts Photo by Karen Bausch

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2

Mark Bowden was born in 1951 in St. Louis,

Missouri. He earned his B.A. from Loyola

College in 1973 and began writing for the

Baltimore News American. From 1979 until 2003 he

held a post at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Bowden is the

author of several books of nonfiction, including Doctor

Dealer (1987); Bringing the Heat (1994); and Killing

Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw, which

won the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan Award in

2002. His critically acclaimed book Black Hawk Down

(1999) tells the story of two downed Army helicopters

and a daring rescue mission by U.S. Special Forces.

Publishers Weekly praised the book as “a gripping

account of combat that merits thoughtful reading by

anyone concerned with the future course of the coun-

try’s military strategy and its relationship to foreign policy.” Black Hawk Down earned Bowden the Overseas

Press Club’s Hal Boyle Award and was made into a

blockbuster film. His magazine article “Finders

Keepers” was made into the movie Money for Nothing

starring John Cusack. Bowden has also written for The

New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, and

the Washington Post. He serves as a national correspondent of The Atlantic. A collection of his magazine articles

entitled Road Work will be published in the fall of

2004.

★

National Endowment for the Arts

Mark Bowden

Their muzzle flashes gave their

positions aw

ay clearly. Stebbins

squeezed off rounds carefully,

trying to conserve ammo. Heard was shooting now with an M-16.

Nearly deaf, he tapped Stebbins

on the shoulder and shouted,

‘Steb, I just want you to know in

case we don’t get out of this, I

think you’re doing a great job.’

Then the ground around them

shook.

Photo courtesy of Viking Penguin

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National Endowment for the Arts Photo by John Earle

Tom Clancy 

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Tom Clancy attended Loyola College, where he studied English.

After graduating in 1969, he worked as an insurance broker until his first novel, The Hunt for Red

October (1984), became an international success. The

novel focuses on a Russian submarine captain who

defects to the United States. President Reagan lauded

the book as “the perfect yarn” and “un-put-downable.”

Clancy followed this debut with a string of bestsellers

that explore current and heated issues. His novels

address topics such as terrorism, the drug wars, espionage, foreign relations, the Cold War, and — his greatest passion — the military. Many of Clancy’s novels have

been adapted into blockbuster films, including 

The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and

Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears. Each novel

since Clancy’s first has been a bestseller. His nonfiction

books have also been met with acclaim. Clancy’s latest

novels are Red Rabbit (2002) and The Teeth of the Tiger

(2003).★

The carrier landing was a 

controlled crash. Massive

landing gear struts and shock

absorbers were needed to

lessen the bone-crushing

impact.The aircraft surged

forward only to be jerked to a

halt by the arresting wire.

They were down. They were

safe. Probably.

“

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National Endowment for the Arts

Judith Ortiz Cofer

Born in Puerto Rico in 1952, Judith Ortiz Cofer

moved to the United States in her youth due to

her father’s service in the U.S. Army during the

Korean War and in the U.S. Navy during the Cuban

Missile Crisis. As an award-winning poet, essayist, and

novelist, Cofer explores her bilingual and multicultural

life in several autobiographical works, including the

novel The Line of the Sun (1991) and her personal narrative Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a

Puerto Rican Childhood (1990). Her latest novel, The

Meaning of Consuelo (2003), focuses on a young girl

coming of age in Puerto Rico in the 1950s and the tension between the traditional island culture and the

increasing presence of American ways of life, often

imported by returning war veterans. Called “a novelist of

historical compass and sensitivity” by the New York

Times, Cofer has received the PEN/Martha Albrand

Special Citation for Nonfiction, among other awards.

She is the Franklin Professor of English at the University

of Georgia.★

Her Papá, our abuelo, had had a

taste of politics during World War II,

when he had become a sort of Angel

to Widows and Orphans. It had been

his job to break the news of a 

son or husband’s death to the

women in his pueblo, as the mayor

had become grief-stricken and 

incapable of performing this most

delicate of duties after his only son

had been killed early in the war.

Photo courtesy of the author

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National Endowment for the Arts Photo by Gay Haldeman

Joe Haldeman J

oe Haldeman was born in Oklahoma City in 1943,

and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, and Washington,

D.C. The recipient of a B.S. in astronomy from the

University of Maryland and an M.F.A. in creative

writing from the University of Iowa, he served in the

U.S. Army from 1967-1969 as a combat engineer.

Stationed in the central Vietnam highlands, he was

severely injured and received the Purple Heart. His first

novel, War Year (1972), which draws from his own

wartime diary, follows Private John Farmer through a

year of service in Vietnam. Haldeman turned to science

fiction for his second novel, The Forever War (1975),

about galactic soldiers in combat and the difficulties they

face in their preparations to return to an Earth that has

aged thousands of years while they have aged only a few.

The Forever War received the two most prestigious sci-

ence fiction honors, the Hugo and Nebula awards. Since

then, Haldeman has written more than 15 books, including Mindbridge (1976), All My Sins Remembered

(1977), World Without End: A Star Trek Novel (1979),

The Hemingway Hoax (1990), 1968: A Novel (1994),

Forever Peace (1997), Forever Free (1999), and

Guardian (2002). He divides his time between

Gainesville, Florida, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,

where he is an adjunct professor in the Writing and

Humanistic Studies Program at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology.

★

‘Tonight we’re going to show

you eight silent ways to kill a

man.’ The guy who said that

was a sergeant who didn’t look

five years older than me. So if

he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d

done it as an infant.

“

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6

National Endowment for the Arts

Barry Hannah 

Born in Clinton, Mississippi, in 1942, Barry

Hannah earned a B.A. from Mississippi College

and a M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas.

His first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972), won the William

Faulkner Prize. In 1978 Hannah published Airships, a

collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, the

Civil War, and the modern South. Widely praised for its

raw, lyric voice, the story collection won the Arnold

Gingrich Short Fiction Award. Philip Roth called these

war stories “masterpieces of their kind.” The following

year, Hannah was honored with the prestigious Award in

Literature from the American Institute of Arts and

Letters. While writing movie scripts in Hollywood for

director Robert Altman, Hannah wrote his breakthrough novel Ray, a powerful story of a former Navy

pilot and doctor struggling to adjust to modern life. Zany

as Catch-22 in its point of view, Ray was called “the funniest, weirdest, soul-happiest work of fiction” by the

New York Times Book Review. Hannah is Director of

the M.F.A. Program and Writer-in-Residence at the

University of Mississippi, and has won a Guggenheim

Fellowship and the Robert Penn Warren Lifetime

Achievement Award. He is a member of the Fellowship

of Southern Writers. In December 2003, he won the

prestigious PEN/ Malamud Award for excellence in the

art of the short story.★

I heard the repeating rifles

behind me and the shrieks,

but my head was a calm,

green church. I was prepared

to accept the big shadow. But I

didn’t seem to be dying. I felt

my neck. I thrust my forefinger in the hole.

Photo courtesy of Grove/Atlantic

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7

National Endowment for the Arts

Victor Davis Hanson 

Described by Publishers Weekly as the potential

heir to Stephen Ambrose as “America’s laureate of military history,” Victor Davis Hanson

was born in 1953 in Selma, California. He received his

Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University and has been

a professor at California State University, Fresno since

1985, where he initiated its Classics Program. He has

written extensively on ancient Greek military history and

modern warfare. His books include The Soul of Battle:

From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three

Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny (1999), The

Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical

Greece (2000), Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles

in the Rise of Western Power (2001), An Autumn of War:

What America Learned from September 11 and the War

on Terrorism (2002), and Ripples of Battle: How Wars

of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live,

and How We Think (2003). He has written for the

Claremont Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, the

New York Times, The Weekly Standard, and writes regular columns for the National Review Online. During

the 2002-2003 academic year, Hanson served as Visiting

Professor of Military History at the United States Naval

Academy.★

What, then, is the soul of 

battle? A rare thing indeed

that arises only when free men

march unabashedly toward the

heartland of their enemy in

hopes of saving the doomed,

when their vast armies are

aimed at salvation and 

liberation, not conquest and

enslavement.

Photo courtesy of Encounter Books

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8

National Endowment for the Arts

Andrew Hudgins 

The son of a West Point Academy graduate,

Andrew Hudgins was raised on military bases,

mostly in the South. He was educated at

Huntingdon College and the University of Alabama, and

he earned his M.F.A. in creative writing from the

University of Iowa in 1983. His poetry collections

include Saints and Strangers (1985), which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize; After the Lost War: A

Narrative (1988); The Never-Ending (1991), a finalist for

the National Book Award; The Glass Hammer: A

Southern Childhood (1994); Babylon in a Jar (1998);

and Ecstatic in the Poison (2003). He is also the author

of a book of essays, The Glass Anvil (1997). In his poetry, Hudgins writes frankly and movingly about his relationship with his father and his childhood in the rural

South. He addresses the soldier’s life in After the Lost

War, a book-length narrative poem about the Civil War

that won the Poets’ Prize. Pat Conroy wrote of it: “How

rare to see poetry with this kind of extraordinary narrative power! The book simply soars.” Hudgins’s many

honors include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’

Conference, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the

National Endowment for the Arts. Hudgins is

Humanities Distinguished Professor at The Ohio State

University.★

On leave, I sat on marsh grass, watched

bees tremble into new red blooms,

and thought of how, a boy, I’d put

my finger on the backs of bees.

Engrossed, they didn’t notice me,

and I careful, wouldn’t touch them long,

a second or two, but long enough

to feel the hard hum of their wings.

Photo courtesy of the author

“

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9

National Endowment for the Arts

McKay Jenkins 

Born in 1963, McKay Jenkins is the author of The

Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army’s

10th Mountain Division and the Assault on

Hitler’s Europe (2003). Meticulously researched, the

book chronicles the Division’s two years of training in

Colorado; its role in the recapture of Kiska, an Aleutian

island occupied by the Japanese; and its critical role

breaking the German Army’s Gothic Line in Italy’s

Apennine Mountains in 1944. A former staff writer for

the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Jenkins has also written The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an

Avalanche Zone (2000), and The South in Black and

White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (1999),

and edited The Peter Matthiessen Reader (2000). He is

completing a book about a murder in the Canadian

Arctic. Jenkins teaches journalism and twentieth-century American literature at the University of Delaware.★

These men were a combination

of European panache, Rocky

Mountain muscle, and East

Coast intelligence: lumberjacks, alpine guides, college

skiers, forest rangers, trappers.

They formed a remarkably 

self-assured group of men that

took its pride not from a region,

such as the famed 36th (Texas)

Infantry Division, but from 

a distinct subculture of 

outdoorsmen that to the public

at large seemed to represent a

kind of masculine ideal.

Photo by Katherine Hinckley

“

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10

National Endowment for the Arts

Bobbie Ann Mason 

Widely touted as a major literary voice chronicling the changing landscape of the contemporary South, Bobbie Ann Mason was raised

on her father’s dairy farm outside Mayfield, Kentucky.

She took her first writing job at a local newspaper, the

Mayfield Messenger, in 1960, and went on to receive

degrees from the University of Kentucky, the State

University of New York at Binghamton, and the

University of Connecticut. Her first volume of fiction,

Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), earned her the 1983

Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for best first fiction. She used her 1983 National Endowment for the

Arts Literature Fellowship to write her first novel, In

Country (1985), which explores a high school girl’s quest

for knowledge about her father, who died in the Vietnam

War just before she was born. In 1989, the novel was

adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by

Norman Jewison and starring Bruce Willis. Mason’s

other books include the novels Spence + Lila (1988) and

Feather Crowns (1993); the memoir Clear Springs

(1999), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and a biography

in the Penguin Lives Series, Elvis Presley (2003). She is

the University of Kentucky’s Writer-in-Residence.★

At the bottom of the wall is a

granite trough, and on the

edge of it the sunlight reflects

the names just above, in mirror writing, upside down.

Flower arrangements are 

scattered at the base. A little

kid says, ‘Look, Daddy, the

flowers are dying.’ The man

snaps, ‘Some are and some

aren’t.’

Photo courtesy of Viking Penguin

“

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11

National Endowment for the Arts

James McBride 

Born in 1957, James McBride grew up as one of 12

siblings in the all-black housing projects of

Brooklyn. He is the son of a black minister and a

Jewish mother, whose efforts to raise her family, while

not admitting she was white, were the subject of

McBride’s award-winning memoir, The Color of Water

(1997). The book was an American Library Association

Notable Book of the Year and remained on the New

York Times bestseller list for two years. In 2002, The

Color of Water became the first selection in the New

York City Reads Together program. His second book,

Miracle at St. Anna (2002), is the story of an Italian

orphan who befriends a black American soldier in Italy

during World War II. The Dallas Morning News hailed

it as “an outstanding novel,” and The Baltimore Sun

called it “searingly, soaringly beautiful.” McBride is a former staff writer for the Washington Post, People

Magazine, and the Boston Globe. He received a master’s

degree in journalism from Columbia University, and is

also an award-winning composer, having studied composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. In

2004, he was nominated by President George W. Bush

and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the

National Council on the Arts.★

It was dawn. The order was to go. One

hundred and twenty black soldiers from

the 92nd Division bunched behind five

tanks and watched them roll toward the

water, then clumsily waded in behind

them, rifles held high. On the other 

side, just beyond the river plains and

mostly hidden in the heavy mountain 

forest of the Apuane Alps, five 

companies of Field-Marshal Albert

Kesselring’s 148th Brigade Division,

seasoned, hardened German troops,

watched and waited.

Photo by Dennis O’Brien

“

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12

National Endowment for the Arts

Marilyn Nelson 

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1946, Marilyn Nelson

was raised on military bases, and as a poet developed a unique perspective on the U.S. Armed

Services as the daughter of one of the last of the

Tuskegee Airmen. She earned her B.A. from the

University of California at Davis, her M.A. from the

University of Pennsylvania, and her Ph.D. from the

University of Minnesota. Her books include For the

Body (1978); Mama’s Promises (1985); The Homeplace

(1990), which won the Annisfield-Wolf Award and was a

finalist for the National Book Award; The Fields of

Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), which was a

finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the

National Book Award, and the PEN Winship Award;

and Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), which was also a

finalist for the National Book Award. She has written

two collections of poetry for children. Her other honors

include two Pushcart Prizes, two Literature Fellowships

from the National Endowment for the Arts, a

Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award. She is a

Professor Emeritus at the University of Connecticut,

Storrs, and has taught most recently at the University of

Delaware.★

Tuskegee Airmen,

uncles of my childhood,

how shall I live and work

to match your goodness?

Can I do more

than murmur name upon name,

as the daughter

of a thousand proud fathers?

Photo by Fran Funk

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13

National Endowment for the Arts

Wyatt Prunty 

The son of a World War II veteran, Wyatt Prunty

was born in Tennessee in 1947 and raised in

Athens, Georgia. After receiving his bachelor’s

degree in English from Sewanee: The University of the

South, he served in the U.S. Navy as a gunnery officer

on the USS Wright and the USS Spiegle Grove, serving

in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the North and

South Atlantic. After his discharge in 1972, Prunty

resumed his academic studies, receiving a master’s

degree in poetry from Johns Hopkins University and a

Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. He has written

six volumes of poetry, including The Times Between

(1982), What Women Know, What Men Believe (1986),

The Run of the House (1993), and Unarmed and

Dangerous: New and Selected Poems (2000). The New

York Times Book Review has praised Prunty’s poems,

stating that “he displays an inherent understanding of

the fact that comedy and tragedy, both on the page and

off, coexist more often than not.” Prunty is Carlton

Professor of English at Sewanee: The University of the

South where he founded and directs the Sewanee

Writers’ Conference and edits the Sewanee Writers’

Series, which is published in conjunction with Overlook

Press.★

He could lie on his back and navigate

Across a ceiling as close and clear

As the luminous face of his father’s watch,

His father gone, flying for Nimitz

And Bull Halsey.

Photo courtesy of Sewanee Writers’ Conference

“

”
14

National Endowment for the Arts

Dan Rifenburgh 

Born in Elmira, New York, in 1949, the poet Dan

Rifenburgh served three years in the U.S. Army

during the Vietnam War and later worked as a

daily newspaper reporter. He was a staff writer for

Soldiers magazine and also wrote for Stars and Stripes

and Army News Feature. He was an honors graduate

from the Journalism program, U.S. Department of

Defense Information School. Rifenburgh completed his

B.A. at Florida Atlantic University and his M.A. at the

University of Florida. He serves as a lecturer for the

University of Houston Creative Writing Program. In

2002, his first collection of poetry, Advent, was published

in London by the Waywiser Press with an introduction

by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur who said of the

collection, “The language of Advent often has the force

of spare accuracy: it can also stun the reader with a brilliant, slow-fuse image.” Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony

Hecht also praised the collection, stating, “These poems

are startling in their vividness, their originality and solidity.” Advent has already garnered critical recognition,

including the Ornish Award from the Texas Institute of

Letters.★

A squadron of pelicans,

Prehistoric remnants, flies over

In perfect ‘V’ formation, remindful,

To the old, of bombers skirting past Dover,

Channel-topping, headed at the Ruhr.

Photo by Tommy Gay

“

”
15

National Endowment for the Arts

Jeff Shaara J

eff Shaara was born in 1952 in New Brunswick,

New Jersey, and grew up in Tallahassee, Florida. He

graduated from Florida State University in 1974,

with a degree in criminology. From age 16, he operated a rare coin business and continued in that business

until he was 36. When his father, the Pulitzer-winning

author Michael Shaara, died in 1988, Jeff Shaara sold his

company and focused on managing his father’s estate. In

1993, during the production of the film Gettysburg,

based on his father’s novel The Killer Angels, Shaara

became friends with film director Ron Maxwell, who

raised the issue of filming a prequel and sequel to the

story of the decisive Civil War battle. After much soulsearching, Shaara decided to undertake the writing task

himself. Two years later, he published Gods and

Generals, the prequel to his father’s novel, which quickly became a New York Times bestseller. In 1998, his

sequel, The Last Full Measure, also became a bestseller.

His next three novels were also critically acclaimed

national bestsellers. Gone for Soldiers focused on the

Mexican-American War, and Rise to Rebellion and The

Glorious Cause centered on the American Revolution.

In 2003, the major motion picture Gods and Generals

was released by Warner Brothers. Shaara lives in

Montana and is now writing a novel set during World War I.★

He raised his head just slightly

and looked around him, saw a

great field of black shapes. He

began to move, slid along the

hard ground, moved up alongside one of the shapes, said in a

low, hoarse voice, ‘You, there. Are

you wounded?’ He waited, then

reached out a hand, touched the

blue cloth, prodded harder,

poked the man’s stiff body, and

he understood.

Photo by Laurie Lane

“

”
16

National Endowment for the Arts

Tobias Wolff 

Born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama, Tobias

Wolff is the author of two memoirs. The first,

This Boy’s Life (1989), won the Los Angeles

Times Book Award and was adapted into a motion picture featuring Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, and

Ellen Barkin. It chronicles Wolff’s difficult childhood 

living with an abusive and violent stepfather. His second

memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War

(1994), is an unflinching account of his military service

from 1964-1968, including a tour in Vietnam. Wolff has

also written three volumes of short stories, including The

Night in Question (1996) and Barracks Thief (1984),

which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and features a story about paratroopers waiting to be sent to

Vietnam. His latest novel, Old School (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for

Fiction, and other awards. Wolff is the recipient of two

Literature Fellowships from the National Endowment

for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Whiting

Writers Award. He is the Woods Professor of English

and Creative Writing at Stanford University.★

A shell exploded somewhere

outside.We hit the deck, our

mouths twisted in dire grins.

Two more went off almost

together. They weren’t very

close, but I felt the shock in my

chest. We waited for the next

one. Then we stood up again,

very, very slowly.

Photo by Giliola Christé

“

”
17

National Endowment for the Arts

James Bradley 

J

ames Bradley studied at the University of Notre

Dame and Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, and

earned a degree in East Asian history from the 

University of Wisconsin. In 2000, his nonfiction book

Flags of Our Fathers burst onto the national scene,

becoming a New York Times bestseller. The book details

the lives of the six soldiers who raised the American flag

on Iwo Jima. One of those men was John “Doc” Bradley

— James’s father. Stephen Ambrose said of Flags of Our

Fathers, “The best battle book I ever read. These stories...fill me with awe.” Bradley’s second book, Flyboys

(2003), was also a New York Times bestseller and

tells the story of eight American “flyboys” who were

executed on the island next to Iwo Jima in World

War II. The ninth pilot evaded capture — his

name was George H. W. Bush. Bradley is

President of the James Bradley Peace

Foundation, which fosters understanding

between America and Asia. In 2003, the

Secretary of the Navy presented Bradley with

the Department of the Navy Superior Public Service

Award.★

Photo courtesy of the author

Will D. Campbell

Photo by Judi Marshall, First Run Productions

The Reverend Will D. Campbell was born in

Liberty, Mississippi, in 1924. He served as a

medic in the U.S. Army during World War II.

After the war, he graduated from the Yale Divinity

School and became a national leader for the cause of

social justice and civil rights. He is the author of more

than a dozen books including his memoir, Brother to

a Dragonfly (1977), which was hailed as one of the

top-ten books of the year by the New York Times;

was named by Time magazine to be one of the

most notable works of nonfiction in the 1970s; and

won a Christopher Award and the Lillian Smith

Award. His other works include the novel The

Glad River (1982), the history Providence

(1992), and the essay collection Soul Among

Lions: Musing of a Bootleg Preacher (1999). In

2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Campbell the

National Medal of the Humanities.★

Writers participating on CD or Web site
18

National Endowment for the Arts

Andrew Carroll I

n 1998, Andrew Carroll founded the Legacy

Project, a national, all-volunteer effort to honor and

remember those who have served this nation in

wartime by seeking out and saving their letters. From

this project came Carroll’s bestseller War Letters, the

compelling correspondence of American military men

and women, as well as the PBS documentary of the

same name. The book features 200 previously unpublished letters from the Civil War, World Wars I and II,

Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, and Bosnia.

Studs Terkel said of the collection, “These war letters are

deeply moving, more revelatory and more powerful than

any dispatch from the front. It’s the truly felt history

of what war is all about.” This book came on the

heels of Carroll’s national bestseller Letters of a

Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American

Letters. In 1993, Carroll co-founded with the late

Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky the American

Poetry & Literacy Project, a nonprofit organiza-

tion that distributes hundreds of thousands of

free poetry books throughout the country to promote literacy. Carroll lives in Washington, D.C.★

Photo courtesy of the author

Shelby Foote Born in Greenville, Mississippi, in 1916, Shelby

Foote served in the U.S. Army and the Marine

Corps during World War II. After the war, he

chronicled life in his native South in stories and novels.

His first novel, Tournament, was published in 1949.

Widely regarded for his historical novels, such as Shiloh

(1952), Foote gained lasting acclaim with the publication of the three-volume history, The Civil War: A

Narrative, which he wrote over a 20-year span.

Newsweek praised the work by stating, “history and

literature are rarely so thoroughly combined as here.”

Foote is a three-time Guggenheim Fellow and has

served as a lecturer at the University of Virginia and

Memphis State University. Foote achieved public

fame after his featured appearances in Ken

Burns’s award-winning documentary, The Civil War.

In 1992, Foote was awarded the Charles Frankel Prize

by the National Endowment for the Humanities.★

Photo by Nancy Crampton
19

National Endowment for the Arts

Yusef Komunyakaa Poet and critic Yusef Komunyakaa was born in

Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947. He served in the

U.S. Army as a journalist in 1969-1970 and was

awarded the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam. His

books of poems include Pleasure Dome: New &

Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001); Thieves of Paradise

(1998), and Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems

1977-1989 (1994), for which he received the Pulitzer

Prize. He explores his war experiences throughout

his poetry, especially in Dien Cai Dau (1988). His

prose is collected in Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews

& Commentaries (2000). He also co-edited The

Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991). His honors include

the William Faulkner Prize from the Université

de Rennes and a Literature Fellowship from the

National Endowment for the Arts. He is a professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative

Writing Program at Princeton University.

★

Photo courtesy of the author

Erin McGraw The daughter of a U.S. Marine who fought in

World War II, Erin McGraw grew up outside

Los Angeles where she began writing in high

school. She is the author of four books of fiction, includ-

ing the story collections Lies of the Saints, The Baby

Tree, and the forthcoming The Good Life. Lies of the

Saints was selected as a New York Times Notable

Book, and her work has been featured on National

Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. She is also the

author of Bodies At Sea. McGraw has published in

The Atlantic Monthly, The Kenyon Review

, and

other publications. A former Stegner Fellow at

Stanford University, McGraw teaches creative

writing and American literature at The Ohio

State University. She is married to the poet Andrew

Hudgins.

★

Photo courtesy of the author
20

National Endowment for the Arts

Louis Simpson Louis Simpson was born in Jamaica, West Indies,

in 1923, and immigrated to the United States at

age 17. In World War II, he served with the

101st Airborne Division in Europe and received the

Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Upon his return, he

earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University and has spent

his career as a poet, professor, and literary critic. The

author of more than 20 books, his work includes The

Arrivistes: Poems 1940-1049 (1949); At the End of the

Open Road, Poems (1963), for which he won the

Pulitzer Prize; Three on the Tower: The Lives and Worlds of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and William

Carlos Williams (1975), which brought him wide

acclaim as a literary critic; and the memoir The

King My Father’s Wreck (1995). Simpson has

received fellowships from the American

Academy of Arts and Letters, Hudson Review,

Guggenheim Foundation, and the National

Endowment for the Arts. His most recent

collection, The Owner of the House: New

Collected Poems 1940-2001, was nominated for the

National Book Award.★

Photo courtesy of BOA Editions

James Salter J

ames Salter was born in 1925 and raised in New

York City. He attended West Point Academy and

served as a fighter pilot during World War II and

the Korean War. He resigned his commission in 1957

after publishing The Hunters (1956), a novel based on

his more than 100 combat missions in Korea. Salter’s

second novel, The Arm of Flesh (1961), also focused on

the U.S. Air Force. His other work includes A Sport and

a Pastime (1967); Solo Faces (1979); and the short-fiction collection, Dusk and Other Stories (1989), which

won the PEN/Faulkner Award. The New York

Times said that Salter’s stories “can suggest in a single sentence, an individual’s entire history, the complex interplay of longing and fear, hope and need,

that has brought about the present.” He wrote the

screenplay to the acclaimed film Downhill Racer

(1969), which starred Robert Redford. His

memoir, Burning the Days (1997), recounts his

life in the military and as an award-winning writer.★

Photo by Linda Girvin
21

National Endowment for the Arts Born in New York City in 1921, Richard Wilbur is

a renowned poet, translator, literary critic, and

editor. A veteran of World War II, Wilbur was

trained as an Army cryptographer and served as a frontline infantryman in Italy, France, and Germany. After

the war, he obtained his M.A. from Harvard in 1947, the

same year his first book of poems was published, The

Beautiful Changes and Other Poems. An accomplished

editor and translator, Wilbur has published translations

of Molière and compiled such anthologies as Poe:

Complete Poems (1959). The winner of numerous

honors, including the Frost Medal, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Wallace Stevens

Award, Wilbur’s original collections include

Things of This World (1956), for which he

received the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; and New and Collected Poems (1988),

which also won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1987, he

was named Poet Laureate of the United States.

★

Photo by Stathis Orphanos

William Jay Smith Of Choctaw descent, William Jay Smith was born

in 1918 in Winnfield, Louisiana, and was raised

in Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, where his

father played in the U.S. Army Band. When World War

II broke out, Smith enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was

transferred to Oahu where his father was also stationed.

But they were soon separated — the son headed into the

war and his father into civilian life. Smith recalls his

youth and young adulthood in Army Brat: A Memoir

(1980). Smith studied at Washington University,

Columbia University, and at Oxford University as a

Rhodes Scholar. The author of 10 collections of

poetry, as well as numerous books of translations,

Smith was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 1968

until 1970. His most recent poetry collection is

The Cherokee Lottery (2000), which concerns

the removal of the southern tribes. He has won

awards from the French Academy, the Swedish

Academy, and the Hungarian government.★

Photo courtesy of William Jay Smith and Curbstone Press

Richard Wilbur
22

National Endowment for the Arts

Anthology Submission Guidelines

As part of Operation Homecoming, the National Endowment for the Arts will

support the printing of an anthology of wartime writing by active U.S. military

personnel and their immediate families. The anthology will be sold in 

bookstores and will be distributed free by the Arts Endowment to military installations,

schools, and libraries. The submission deadline is December 31, 2004. 

The Arts Endowment has no preconceived ideas about the content of the 

anthology. There are no restrictions upon genre — poems, letters, personal 

narratives, stories, memoir, journal writing, and other literary forms are all welcome.

Some works may address actual combat, others may focus on life on the homefront.

Many works may be personal — a soldier’s or a spouse’s attempt to capture and 

clarify a singularly challenging moment in life. Some of it may rise to literature —

vivid accounts of experience that arrest the reader’s attention and linger in the 

memory. All of it will have historical value as the testimony of men and women 

who saw the events directly. Operation Homecoming will capture these individual

accounts and preserve them for the public record. American letters will be richer 

for their addition.

The National Endowment of the Arts will not be able to publish all of the works

sent due to space limitations, but the Arts Endowment will ensure that after the 

project is completed, the submissions are deposited at an appropriate government

archive for the education of future generations of Americans. 

SUBMISSION STYLE

Submissions should be no longer than 50 typescript, double-spaced, numbered 

pages. Materials must be legible and clearly reproduced. Please use font sizes no

smaller than 11 and no larger than 14 points. Please use paper that measures 

8-1/2 by 11 inches. 

Please include a cover sheet with each submission that contains a legal name, 

address, phone number, and email address if applicable. Because of troop rotation

and deployments, it is particularly important to have a current email address or 

permanent address to respond to regarding submissions.

Copies of submissions cannot be returned. Please keep a copy for yourself.

SUBMISSION ADDRESS

Submissions can be emailed to:

submissions@operationhomecoming.org 

Or mailed to:

National Endowment for the Arts

Operation Homecoming Anthology

Suite 519

1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20506
Tuskegee Airmen,

uncles of my childhood,

how shall I live and work

to match your goodness?

Can I do more

than murmur name upon name,

as the daughter

of a thousand proud fathers?

–– Marilyn Nelson
A Great Nation Deserves Great Art.

www.operationhomecoming.org