Donald Anderson
"To repossess we must imagine: our
first memories are as dim as they are
lasting."

                  -Wright Morris
If it seems to fall to the historian to make distinctions
among wars, each war's larger means and ends, the
trajectory for the artist, regardless of culture or time,
seems to fall towards an individual's disillusionment, the
means and ends of war played out in the personal.  For
the individual soldier, the sweeping facts of history are
accurately written not in the omniscient, third-person
plural, but in the singular first.  We live in a culture that
values the individual.  Our works of art about war mirror
this welcome bias.... Aristotle's notion that History
accretes, but only Poetry unifies is a notion worth
subscribing to.  Art grants access to a larger world, allows
us to live other lives, allows us to examine the quality and
meaning of our own lives.  Whose very earliest
recollections do not include the request, Tell me a Story?  
The human race needs stories.  We need all the
experience we can get.

—from "War, Memory, Imagination," a Prologue by
Donald Anderson
Statistically speaking, very few of us will ever
experience life and death moments in battle, but
these fifteen highly individual essays, which include
incisive comment on the carnage at Chickamauga
and the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, will
prompt us to ponder mortality, morality, and fate.


—ForeWord Magazine