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Washington troops share their voices

Oct- 6-2006 » Filed Under: Homefront

MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune

Flying wounded soldiers out of Iraq, flight nurse Ed Hrivnak and his fellow crew members used to stick big strips of white tape on the legs of their flight suits.

They were so busy treating their patients they didn’t have time to sit with a notebook. So they’d write quick thoughts on the pieces of tape.

Those notes were the beginnings of Hrivnak’s journal – writing that found its way into a collection of work by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan called “Operation Homecoming.”

The 37-year-old Air Force Reserve captain from Spanaway contributed a half-dozen short vignettes that describe what it was like to fly the wounded out of Iraq in the first six months of the war.

Several other writers with regional connections have work in the new book, including:

• Jack Lewis, an Army Reserve staff sergeant from Seattle, who was in Iraq with the Fort Lewis Strykers of the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division. His haunting story, “Road Work,” takes place on a Stryker convoy near the Syrian border in far northwestern Iraq.

• Brian Turner, a Stryker infantryman with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, who contributed his poetry. He’s now out of the Army and teaching literature at Fresno City College in California, and last year published a collection of poems titled “Here, Bullet.”

• Sandi Austin, a civil affairs reservist from California who also went to Iraq with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. She contributed a song she first performed at the brigade’s New Year’s Eve celebration at a dusty, windswept camp near Samarra.[...]


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