The National Endowment for the Arts’ new writing program for soldiers “seeks to address a seeming cultural paradox. War stories, after all, occupy one of literature’s longest, weightiest shelves, and American fighting men, from Ulysses S. Grant to Anthony Swofford, have set down their battle-forged memoirs, but these days the military and literary worlds barely overlap. The program, called ‘Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience,’ is aimed at preserving stories from the battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan. The endowment expects to hold 20 or so workshops at American military installations between now and next spring.”