War stories -- literal and literary

To Lieutenant Colonel Paul D. Danielson, a US Army Reserve combat surgeon from Holden, the difference between amputating a soldier's foot in Iraq and treating a civilian in the United States is that the soldier is more apt to say, "Thank you, Doc."

For Danielson, other wartime differences included: wearing flip-flops to the operating table, because blood is tough to wash off boots; performing surgery in 100-degree heat in shorts and a T-shirt, while wearing a sidearm; and mending the gaping wounds of soldiers who remained calm even while their shattered, bloody limbs were hanging together by sinew.

The grim business also was brisk. The field hospital in Baghdad, where Danielson was posted, handled 700 cases in three months.

"There's no end point," said Danielson, 40, who served with the 20-member 912th Forward Surgical Team in the summer of 2003.

Now, Danielson and 99 others who have returned from Iraq are featured as the writers who contributed to a first-ever anthology of poems, essays, and stories from an ongoing US war. Titled "Operation Homecoming," the collection is a National Endowment for the Arts project that seeks to give the American public an uncensored view of feelings and experiences from soldiers in combat and their loved ones on the home front.

Danielson, a pediatric surgeon at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, will join two other speakers tomorrow to read their works at the John F. Kennedy Library. The 1 p.m. event, moderated by Andrew Carroll, editor of the anthology, is free.

For Danielson, who joined the Army Reserve in 1992 on the day he graduated from the University of Rochester School of Medicine, the narrative was an extension of a journal he kept in Iraq. Although he has had work appear in scientific journals, Danielson had never published anything in literary form before.

The reading tomorrow will be "a little more nerve-racking" than surgery, Danielson said. "There aren't too many things that scare me in the operating room."

That kind of fresh voice, solicited by the government for the first time in American literary history, has helped produce a work that is uniquely important, said Jon Parrish Peede, project director.

"The striking thing is they moved from merely reporting affairs to the realm of actual literature," Peede said. Much of American war literature, like "The Red Badge of Courage," was fiction written by noncombatants.

In "Operation Homecoming," Peede said, "there's a level of authenticity and rawness."

That rawness brings alive the horror and humanity of war. Danielson's prose puts the reader next to bleeding US soldiers and alongside surgeons who do their work with a gallows humor.

"You get a little bit of that morbid desire," he said. "We didn't want more casualties, but we wanted more 'market share' " of the wounded. "You want to do what you're trained to do."

Amy Macdonald, forum coordinator at the Kennedy Library & Museum, said, "I can't imagine anything more powerful on Veterans Day than to have our present-day soldiers, having experienced this, sharing these stories."

Danielson said he hopes the book can help bridge the misunderstanding he senses between the military and the American public, which sometimes does not realize that the soldiers on the ground "are just like the rest of us," but are "doing truly heroic things. "

In Worcester, Danielson operates on patients under age 18 and often treats traumatic injuries.

But three months in Baghdad, he said, made him even more grateful for his wife, three young children, and the small pleasures of his life.

"The little things," he said, "don't bother you as much."

Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at b_macquarrie@globe.com.