In this conversation: war poems by Walt Whitman, Yehuda Amichai, and Siegfried Sassoon; Jonathan Shay’s books Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, how veterans view the representation of war in Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now; Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death; war and politicians from the Iliad and Thucydides to Henry Kissinger; and much more.

See also: ⁠Tom Palaima, “Writing on War”⁠

Thomas G. Palaima is the Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor and the founding director of the university’s Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory in the Department of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin.