My Americans for the Arts colleague, David Dombrosky, brought Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience to my attention in 2006. The result of a major initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts, Homecoming brought distinguished writers to military bases to inspire U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and their families to record their wartime experiences.
Homecoming is continuing in 2008 with a series of writing workshops, and today the University of Chicago Press released an expanded paperback version of 2006′s Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families (Random House), containing stories by American military personnel and their loved ones who wrote candidly about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on the home front.