Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience

If there is any suspicion that PBS is trying to butch it up for the Bush administration, this film's thoughtful and heartbreaking depiction of the hell and loss of war is an eloquent counterbalance.

No film can ''capture'' the experience of combat, but this eloquent and moving documentary brings us closer to the emotions (principally boredom and terror) of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than perhaps any previous examination.

The cumulative effect of Operation Homecoming is to bring to light the soldiers' collective experiences and the enduring nightmares they suffer in our place.

By acknowledging and publicizing its subjects’ writing, the film proves a stirring tribute to those who fight; in their stories, it offers a potent reminder that war is a hell suffered both externally and—more permanently—internally.

Operation Homecoming at first seems like a modest enterprise, a document of a few guys' paths to personal catharsis. But the sense of damaged intensity found in all these men's writing -- and found in war lit since the classical age -- builds to a powerful crescendo, and the haunting poem that ends the film, in which the ghosts of American and Iraqi dead confront each other on the banks of the Tigris, is a showstopper.

The best pieces portray combat as such a heightened sensory experience that it demands to be written about, and they suggest that war can turn ordinary men who wouldn’t think of keeping diaries into latter-day Hemingways.

A project such as Operation Homecoming should shed light on their experiences, but Robbins' film just falls short. [06 Apr 2007, p.E17]