May 3, 2004 by s.z.

Literary News WO'C reader (and discoverer of material in the most unlikely places) David E. points us to this item at Voice of America News: A new federal program will help American soldiers learn to be storytellers. The National Endowment for the Arts has launched Operation Homecoming, a series of writing workshops for veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The workshops will be taught by some of America's most prominent writers and poets. Okay, this sounds like it could be a good idea. The article quotes "Colonel Michael Pachuta, director of Morale, Welfare and Recreation Policy at the Department of Defense," who says: "We learn lessons from the past. And it's great to get these things down on paper from the first hand participants as soon after the fact as possible. It probably benefits them from a therapeutic viewpoint and also heightens the public's awareness of their experiences and their sacrifices." Yes, it could be therapeutic for them to write about their experiences, and maybe their efforts would indeed help the public to better understand and honor their sacrifices. So, who are some of those prominent writers and poets teaching the workshops? The instructors will include poet Marilyn Nelson, as well as Tom Clancy, the author of best-selling technothrillers, and the award winning novelists and short story writers Bobbie Ann Mason and Tobias Wolff. Yes, Tom Clancy will be teaching others to write.  As if these veterans haven't suffered enough already.  Like David said: Seriously - they get all freaked out about chocolate on the boobies, but having the world's second-biggest hack train barely literate high school dropouts how to write their own Lump in the Bed poem on federal dollars is A-OK. If you're like me, you haven't read more than a chapter of a Clancy book (and that was ten or twenty years ago).  So, to remind you of just what the experience is like, I skimmed through some online excerpts of Clancys more recent books (www.bookbrowse.com has several, as does Amazon), picked out a few sections, and put them together in a combined excerpt.  I call it Rainbow Tiger Rabbit: Everyman an Op Center: On Friday morning of the August week in 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait, Lieutenant General Chuck Horner was at 27,000 feet, cruising at .9 Mach (540 knots), and nearing the North Carolina coast. He was headed out to sea in the Lady Ashley, a recent-model Block 25 F-16C, tail number 216, that had been named after the daughter of his crew chief, Technical Sergeant José Santos. Horner's aide, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hartinger, Jr., known as "Little Grr," was on Horner's left side, a mile out, slightly high. Maybe the presence of his wife, one daughter, and a son-in-law made him a little itchier than usual. No, that wasn't right. He wasn't itchy at all, not about flying anyway. He grimaced. Well, yes, he had to admit that things were a hell of a lot better than they'd been for nearly all of his life. No more swimming out of a submarine to do a collection on a Russian beach, or flying into Tehran to do something the Iranians wouldn't like much, or swimming up a fetid river in North Vietnam to rescue a downed aviator ... Patsy must have caught a silver bullet on their wedding night, and Ding glowed more about it than she did. The final score had been one badly shot-up Marine, and sixteen dead Arabs, plus two live captives for the Intel pukes to chat with. It had ended up being more productive than anyone had expected. It was a computer, a GPS unit, phone, clock, radio, TV, modem, credit card, camera, scanner and even a little weavewire fax, all in one. It was an honored local custom, and it had worked out pretty well for one Winston Spencer Churchill. He was in his fifties, but he wasn't too old to go up against an enemy  Death did not come instantly. His body collapsed when all of the electrochemical commands to his muscles ceased. Hundreds of miles away, another man named Caruso was thinking the same thing.   So, just think of the possibilites of having vets from George's Excellent Adventures learning to write the Clancy way.  As McKay Jenkins, one of the non-prominent workshop leaders put it: "When you ask people to write about war, there's always the possibility that they will write brutally about it, cynically about it, politically about it," he said. "You just don't know what might come out." Hopefully, it will be nothing like a Clancy novel.  6:40:46 AM

What We've Accomplished Wo'C commenter par excellence "glenstonecottage" points us Pandogon, where Jesse reveals Fox's Big Announcement: So, I'm watching Fox News Sunday to see what this big response to Nightline's honoring of fallen soldiers in Iraq is going to be. After Bill Kristol threw a really unbecoming snit fit (that, apparently, it would have been okay if they took longer and listed people who'd died in Afghanistan as well - but otherwise it was a "revolting" anti-war statement), they revealed their big response: next week's Fox News will feature a list of What We've Accomplished in Iraq. And Mr. Cottage says: Hey, s.z., this sounds like a PERFECT excuse for a Letterman-top-ten-list contest for W'O C readers, so here are my entries: 10. The words "plastic turkey" will be forever associated with our pResident. 9. Succesfully breaking the trillion-dollar-debt barrier. 8. Torture: now an equal-opportunity pastime, getting an enthusistic "thumbs-up" from some of our female troops. 7. Haliburton stock: WAY up! 6. Bill O'Reilly: forced to admit publicly that he was full of shit. 5. The new Iraqi flag: my, don't they love it over there! 4. France and Germany: closer than they have EVER been before! 3. You always THOUGHT Tony Blair was a c---sucker, but you couldn't quite prove it... 2. Bu$hCo's unsuccessful attempts to blame faulty Iraq intelligence on the CIA has given the Agency rare and unusual popularity among liberals. 1. The codpiece: it's back again! I don't think I can top that list, so I'm not going to even try ... Well, maybe a really short list:  3.  That videotape of Saddam's post-capture medical exam proved to the world that nobody can search for lice like the USA! 2.  The patriotism and bravery shown by our war bloggers was an inspiration to everyone.  (When Andrew Sullivan was awarded the Purple Heart for the baggy eyes he got in the course of a late-night blogging incident, I think we all stood a little taller.)  1.  The missing WMDs made great fodder for Bush's boffo stand-up act. Anyway, as we used to say when I was a kid, if you don't contribute your own list, glenstonecottage wins.  (Well, we used to say "the terrorists" instead of "glenstonecottage", and it was only a couple of years ago, but you get the idea.)  So, enter now -- there may be fame and fortune in it for you!  (But probably not.) 3:55:50 AM

Look!  Up in the Sky!  It's ApocalypseMan! Here's David Frum (the REAL reason that O'Reilly wants to boycott Canada?), blogging about Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin's meeting with President Bush on Friday: George W. Bush is an extremely shrewd reader of character. I strongly suspect that within minutes of his meeting with Martin, he will have sussed out Martin’s secret: Which is that Martin, though in many ways a very shrewd politician, is in his innermost core a very weak man. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The Bush knows!  He probably does it by using that laser vision thing that Karen Hughes told us about. And in a related development, today's LA Times had various experts analyze the President's decision making techniqes (based on the info about Bush provided in Karen and David's books, as well as the recent less-nice insider accounts).  The conclusion they come to is that Bush doesn't use the analytic techniques he was taught at Harvard, and doesn't really think about alternatives and consequences.  Instead, he just jumps in and takes action, based on his gut instinct -- see, he's "decisive," and to him, that seems to be all that matters.  (Real men don't read papers, sit through long meetings, or discuss stuff -- they just forcefully make decisions and boss people around!) In practice, Bush appears closest to the style of Reagan, said Bert A. Rockman, director of the School of Public Policy and Management at Ohio State University. "The decisiveness part is certainly there," he said. "The imperviousness to facts and analysis is also there. So what we have is someone who is going on raw instinct." A corollary, Rockman said, is that though Bush likes making decisions, his organizational style is not very good at implementation or follow-up. Richard K. Betts, director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, said that though Bush's style was similar to Reagan's, he seemed to rely on a narrower circle of advisors. "Bush appears to rest his confidence in a few people whose judgment corresponds to his gut instincts" he said. "He seems to be obsessive about being decisive, but willing to make hard and fast decisions on the basis of ideology more than evidence." You know what this means -- we're pretty much doomed. 3:00:17 AM