Veteran's Art Shown at Nat'l Guard Memorial Building

Artist Dominic Fredianelli with one of his paintings. PHOTO: NGEF

Visual artist and veteran Dominic Fredianelli, one of three Michigan National Guard soldiers featured in the 2011 documentary "Where Soldiers Come From," recently exhibited his work during a National Guard Education Foundation (N.G.E.F.) legislative workshop reception in Washington, D.C.

The NGEF organization is separate from but co-located with the National Guard Association of the United States, and shares occupancy of the National Guard Memorial Building at One Massachusetts Ave., Washington, D.C., where the event took place.

A gallery of photographs from the event were posted on the NGEF Facebook page here.

According to press materials:

While serving in the National Guard, Dominic deployed to Afghanistan with Michigan's 1431st Engineer Company and performed route clearance duties for nine months as part of the Global War on Terrorism. After returning home, Dominic turned to art as a way of grappling with his experiences during the war. He has completed murals at the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago, at UC-Santa Barbara and at Finlandia University. He continues to create art that speaks to the mental, physical and psychological impact of combat on today's military veterans.

Fredianelli is currently a student at the Corcoran College of Art and Design.

Special 'O-Dark-Thirty' Spotlights Summer Workshop

The Veterans Writing Program, Washington, D.C. has released a special edition of its print and on-line literary journal, "O-Dark-Thirty." The issue's content was created in a summer writing and film-making seminar on the Mount Vernon campus of George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

The 2013 event was part of a veterans writing initiative sponsored by the university's writing program.

More than 40 military service members, veterans, and family members from around the nation participated in the week-long residential seminar. There, they crafted films, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and plays.

The resulting special issue is available on-line as a free PDF download here. The issue features seven works of non-fiction, six poems, and two plays. This is the second time plays or scripts have been presented on the pages of "O-Dark-Thirty," which has been published since spring 2013.

Instructors at the seminar included:

• Joseph Bathanti, poetry

• Mark Farrington, fiction

• Kelly Kennedy, non-fiction

• KJ Sanchez, playwriting

The allied non-profit Patton Veterans Project, New York, N.Y. also supported the event via its I Was There Film Workshops.

The non-profit organization was founded by Benjamin Patton, the youngest grandson of World War II Gen. George S. Patton, and author of 2012's "Growing Up Patton." The organization's work focuses addressing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.) and Traumatic Brain Injury (T.B.I.) through film and narrative. At the June 2013 seminar, film-making instructors also included Christina Raia, Minos Papas, Sean Mannion, and Alex Arbogast.

Seven short films created by seminar participants can be viewed on-line here.

A website for the Patton Veterans Project is here. A Facebook page is here.

A website for the Veterans Writing Project is here. A Facebook page is here. The organization's "O-Dark-Thirty" literary journal website is here. Single issues or 4-issue subscriptions are available here.

The cover of the special "O-Dark-Thirty" issue was designed by veteran Janis Albuquerque.

Tom Ricks Calls for Readers' Essays on Future Wars

In parallel to a similar brainstorming effort by his employers at the New America Foundation, blogger-journalist-author Tom Ricks has solicited essays from readers of his blog, "The Best Defense," found at the Foreign Policy magazine website. The theme or topic? "What we should be thinking about the war after next."

Writes Ricks:

I am going to run some solicited essays on the subject. But I also want to open the blog up to others, so I am now announcing the Best Defense future of war blog post contest. This is open to all readers. 

Please keep your submissions relatively short—I want posts, not War College essays. It might be best to write about a topic with which you are personally familiar, or have studied. But if you want, you can write under this title: "What we should be thinking about the war after next."

Ricks is part of a mental task force that also includes the foundation's Peter Bergen, Rosa Brooks, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Sascha Meinrath. Bergen, the organization's director of national security studies, established in an earlier Foreign Policy blog post the intellectual engine that is driving its exercise in military futurism:

"Some argue that when U.S. combat troops finally withdraw from Afghanistan in December 2014, the nation will no longer be at war, and the 2001 AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force] should be repealed—or be deemed to have effectively expired." Bergen wrote. "Others argue that the end of the conflict in Afghanistan will not mark the end of U.S. efforts to use military force against terrorists in other parts of the globe, and that we need some sort of new AUMF to structure (and constrain) such future uses of force."

Click here for Ricks' original call for submissions. A No. 1 winner will be the guest of New America Foundation during an upcoming confab among experts. Runners-up will receive an autographed copy of a book by Ricks or Bergen.

Send submissions to: ricksblogcomment AT gmail.com