{"id":2499,"date":"2004-12-16T10:27:06","date_gmt":"2004-12-16T15:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/12\/16\/2499.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:47:28","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:47:28","slug":"puff-piece-operation-homecomin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/12\/16\/puff-piece-operation-homecomin\/","title":{"rendered":"Puff Piece: Operation Homecoming"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, and when I started this blog thing I told myself that I mustn’t let it degenerate into a constant litany of complaints against the various annoyances of life. As a rule, I said, for every hatchet job I write, I need to write a puff piece. Over the months, this has meant that I don’t write very many hatchet jobs (or at least not as many as I start to). On the other hand, I don’t write very many puff pieces, either. So having given in to the weakness to complain about a New York Times piece, I’ll plant a big kiss on the web site of Operation Homecoming<\/a>. Operation Homecoming is a NEA\/DoD program that runs writing workshops for returning soldiers as part of the debriefing. The program was recently expanded to increase the number of workshops and locations; I’ve seen a variety of numbers but it looks like the total cost is less than a million dollars and most of that is picked up by corporate sponsors.\n

Now, I don’t want to get too romantic about returning soldiers, and if you are interested, you should probably read opposing articles such as Aleksandar Hemon’s Operation Homeland Therapy<\/a> in Slate as well as admiring articles such as Dennis Ryan’s dcmilitary.com<\/a> note. I happen to have a soft spot for the World War One “war poets”, and I think that it’s breathtaking to suggest that Americans want to invest even a trifle of money in the possibility of a few gems in uniform.\n

Digression: If you happened to read a new specfic novel set in some world that had as part of the background the fact that the military, for whatever reason, recruited its officers from the universities’ top-ranked historians, poets and mathematicians, and that a really first-class translator of dead languages was pretty much guaranteed a commission, would you dismiss it as implausible or what? And then for the poetry coming out of the war experience to be a separate and highly valued subgenre? End Digression.\n

I also happen to like the Library of Congress’s Veteran’s History Project<\/a>. I understand those people who find this all to be a glorification of the military life, but mostly I find it to have a refreshing sense of respect for the individuals who wear the uniforms, as well as for writing itself. I don’t care if anybody ever reads the anthologies, nor do I expect ever to read them myself, or if I do to like anything in them. I just think it’s a great idea.\n

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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