The National Endowment for the Arts this week announced a program to encourage troops returning from Iraq to write about their experiences.

The NEA has lined up prominent authors to help soldiers express what they have seen and felt in combat. The best stories will be compiled in an anthology.

The NEA project will add to extensive oral history projects supported by the military, and to a Library of Congress initiative to collect material, including journals and letters, from veterans of the two world wars, and the Korean, Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. “Operation Homecoming,” which will anthologize the best of the material it collects, is focused on soldiers fresh from ongoing conflict.

“These are not voices we would easily hear, otherwise,” says Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA. They haven’t been heard for a number of reasons, most important of which is that America’s military men and women are preoccupied with fighting. Gioia also notes that one spur to the project is the realization that much of what is being said and recorded about the war is happening through e–mail, a medium that is more ephemeral than the letters and journals that captured the grit of military life in earlier conflicts.

Read more in The Washington Post.