Posted: September 13th, 2017

Who will stand/What is Owned

Who will stand/What is Owned

1. Who Returns (Rely mainly upon Ronald Glasser, Wounded: Vietnam-Iraq, pp. 9-10; 141-44; 13-24; 27-105, and any additionally relevant articles/commentary).

“Despite the growing sophistication of our battlefield medicine and the new body armor, the orthopedic wards at Walter Reed are becoming filled with numbers of amputees not seen since the Civil War… Today’s survivors are more damaged – and damaged in more and different ways than anyone had expected – nor had ever seen before.”

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2. Who Will Stand/What Is Owed (Rely mainly upon Peter Marin, “What the Vietnam Vets Can Teach Us,” in Grace Sevy, ed., The American Experience in Vietnam, pp. 75-85, and Ronald Glasser, Wounded: Vietnam-Iraq, pp. 115-140, and any additionally relevant articles/commentary).

Prop.: “There is a moral seriousness among many veterans of the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan that puts to shame the carelessness and evasions of American life. And in the United States of Inattention, such seriousness must still struggle to be heard. After all, as of 2006, according to one Army surgeon, America was a place where no one with a lawn service knew or wrote to anyone in Iraq or Afghanistan…”

Clear and well-phrased writing is the most important ingredient in this assignment. In most instances, we don’t really know what we think until we attempt the serious work of “getting it right” on the page. And such work can succeed only through rewriting, or revision. There are no short-cuts, in other words, to concise, persuasive, and polished prose. It is, then, unacceptable to turn in a first unrevised draft, just as it is unacceptable to pretend that your writing is effective simply because you think it is “close enough.”