Soldiers Blog Their Way to Great Poetry

A very good article appears in the New York Times today covering US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who have written amazing poetry, fiction, and memoirs about their experiences of the two wars. This is not the first time soldiers have written about the battlefield: the Bello Gallico and All Quiet on the Western Front are two good examples. But the article does a great job getting to why today's soldiers feel compelled to write. Its explanations of the themes these authors explore was illuminating for me.


However, we're more interested in how these authors got their start. Elisabeth Bumiller, author of the Times piece, provides a hint:

Other books started as soldier blogs, at least before commanders shut them, among them “My War” by Colby Buzzell, a former machine gunner in Iraq. Another soldier’s blog, shut by the Army in 2008 but to be published as a book in April, is “Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War,” by Matt Gallagher, a former Army officer in Iraq.

The Internet seems to be very important to the development of these new poets and authors, even as some in the military attempt to curb the online activities of our troops. During Vietnam, the phrase most often used to describe the new role of television was 'bringing the war into people's living rooms.' Now that many of us have been desensitized to televised images of war [or now that some of these images aren't being broadcast], blogs and social media tools are fulfilling the role of personalizing these conflicts for us at home by bringing the war onto people's laptops.

These tools have been doing this not by bombarding us with gruesome, shocking images, but by turning a growing percentage of our soldiers into authors and poets. This new generation of war writers is encouraged by the social web to express its opinions in a variety of ways. They have chosen creative outlets to do so, and have gifted us with poetry, fiction, and memoirs of extraordinary depth and even beauty in the face of ugly truths.