Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience

The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts sent experienced writers to Afghanistan and Iraq to give writing workshops to the American troops. The resulting poems, fiction stories, letters, diaries and memoirs form the basis of this documentary made by Richard E. Robbins. Interviews with American soldiers provide a personal framework for their detailed descriptions of war. Veterans and quotes from works by prominent authors and philosophers put their accounts in a broader and more timeless context. The soldiers and their literary texts speak for themselves and almost render the illustrative archive footage and the soundtrack unnecessary. What connects the troops, no matter how different they may be, is the conviction that art can establish an emotional link between an unspeakable experience and the future. On the home front, people generally pay little attention to their experiences. Or as one veteran puts it, only an inexcusably decadent society would send young people off to war and then lose interest in them for evermore. During their training, the soldiers are taught how to be perfect, but war is by definition chaotic and unpredictable. The texts bear witness to feelings of guilt, humour as a survival strategy, utter boredom versus unexpected violence, and the inability to put the most horrendous experiences into words. Their sincerity results in a tribute to the fallen.