Commentary
Many years ago, I began working on a project that eventually became this article. It started when a friend of mine, a fellow veteran, sent me Victor Hanson’s 2007 piece “Why Study War.”  One of the many things that stood out to me about that article was a line from Margaret Atwood’s poem “The Loneliness of the Military Historian”:
“Confess: it’s my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.”
My first thought upon reading those words was, “I know exactly how this feels,” a sense that increased when I looked up the poem and read it in its entirety. Although Atwood was talking about the loneliness and disconnect that she felt as a woman in the male-dominated field of military history, I empathized immediately with the emotions expressed in her verse. I also wondered what Atwood’s poem, published in 1995, might look like if it were written not from the perspective of a woman struggling in a male-dominated field, but instead from the perspective of a post-9/11 veteran struggling with his or her own issues and trying to make sense of life back home. I could certainly relate to that….