Operation Homecoming

Stryker

Laura Darrow

Eng 102

2 July 2010

I was pleased that we had an assignment available about Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. I had watched this only a month or two prior to taking this class during a time in which I watched a lot of war documentaries. First watching Operation Homecoming I was surprised at the movie’s style. It is a series of poems and writing from soldiers and their families, yet it plays similarly to a documentary. When you get to hear the words read to you and see the images put alongside the poems, memoirs, letters and essays, it makes the experiences seem much more real and true.

I feel like there are elements from both Tim O’Brien’s and Sean Huze’s styles in the movie. Of course it is hard to relate other peoples writing’s to one of theirs. I feel like these soldiers who have written their stories each have their own style because they all had their own experiences. Even if two men were at the same place at the same time, a foot away from each other looking at the same thing, they will retell that experience differently. Things don’t get recorded by what you see, rather your thought process and mental state also affect how you will perceive things.

Some of the writers such as Sangjoon Han seem to have a more O’Brien approach to writing. He wants to get the truest story out, and to do so he cannot make it one true story. He says it is a story he has heard from many soldiers, so to make it true for all of them, he couldn’t make it true for only one. While O’Brien brings a deep and personal emotion to his writing, Huze uses raw emotion, not trying to glam it up. I feel like “Men in Black” by Colby Buzzell can be compared to Huze’s style of writing. In the story the character tends to think freely, and the story is brutally unglamorous. Nothing extraordinary about it, just getting shot at and being an inch from death, being scared out of his mind. One thing that is similar to Huze’s story in “Men in Black” is when he sees people he believes to be civilians and asks his squad leader what to do. “Just fuckin’ shoot ‘em! These people have no fuckin’ business out on the street whatsoever!”. While the gunner did not shoot to kill, in Huze’s play there is a situation that is related. LCPL Dodd describes the action from earlier that day, “Yeah, there’d been some ‘collateral damage’. That’s the nice way of saying we killed a bunch of civilians. Fuck ‘em. What the hell were they doing in war zone anyways?” (Huze 3).

One old veteran who is a commentator on the film says that at first it was different, but then war is still always war. Today’s war is all volunteers, whereas in past wars there was a draft instated. After reflecting for a moment the man said, “but I suppose it’s all the same once you get there”. Several of the stories talk about the pain soldiers come back with from killing civilians while at war. When you are here in America, and you hear that a group of marines killed 100 civilians, most are outraged, pissed off at the troops. Then of course there’s the gung-ho people who would have us just bomb everybody if it gets the few we are after. After reading Huze’s play and watching this movie, among other things, I still must say that I am disgusted by a lot of the slaughter that takes place there. But once you hear these stories, you know that they are just as disgusted, and it is worse for them because they are the ones who committed the acts. While still being angered by stories of civilians and journalists being killed, I can begin to empathize with some of the soldiers.



Works Cited

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. Robbins, Richard. The Documentary Group.

Huze, Sean. The Sand Storm. NY: Susan Schulman Literary Agency, Jan 2004. Pg 3.