Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

No grunt who has seen a friend lose a leg to an IED, killed an insurgent with a shot to the head at point-blank range (as the kid next door did), or survived a mortar or RPG attack, will come home to Fort Lewis, WA (for example) and sit in a workshop with officers all over the place and write about the experience in an intelligible and intelligent manner. It just will not happen.

It may be therapeutic to write of the experience (as in art and music therapies), but until the immediacy of the experience can be worked through, it is naught but a literary exercise under military supervision: dangerous for a soldier who is told to support the war effort by a superior officer in all he or she does. This is all a propaganda effort by the Pentagon, akin to Laura Bush's selected invitations to her poetry tea party last year to talk about Whitman, Hughes, and Dickinson. The former librarian probably could not have picked a better trio of tea party protesters. This "literary" event will also fail.