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| Writing the Wartime Experience
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 Robert Olen Butler, 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.
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