Female Vets Fight Another Battle at Home: Restoring their Spirits
by Helen Benedict
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Over this past year, I have talked to forty or so women soldiers for my forthcoming book, The Lonely Soldier: Women at War in Iraq, and it has become clear to me that they have a set of needs quite different from those of men....
The Private War of Women Soldiers
(
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...en_in_military)
by Helen Benedict
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As thousands of burned-out soldiers prepare to return to Iraq to fill President Bush's unwelcome call for at least 20,000 more troops, I can't help wondering what the women among those troops will have to face. And I don't mean only the hardships of war, the killing of civilians, the bombs and mortars, the heat and sleeplessness and fear. I mean from their own comrades -- the men....
Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Wherein Lies the Truth (The Practical Writer, Penguin Books, 2004.)
by Helen Benedict
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"Fiction steps in where the ordinary articulateness of human beings fails. It gives the human soul a voice."
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Then I shocked them even further. I told them that I had chosen fiction because I believed it could get me nearer to the truth. The kind of truth I am talking about is the subjective truth of what it means to be a human being in the world. It is the substance of what happens to people not just on the outside, but within: the longings, the moral decisions, the defiance, suffering, pain and triumphs of the human soul. ....
The Frightened Muse (2001-2006)
by Helen Benedict posted on Featurewell.com
UPDATED, 2006
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“The deaths in New York were horrible and irreparable, but they did not make us special. They did not make us more important than any other country in any other war. This is what Primo Levi understood about his war, and what we need to understand about ours.”
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The week after I left New York to live and write in Paris for a year, the World Trade Center was destroyed and one of my French cousins killed his wife and himself, leaving behind their four children. ....
Racism Railroaded Justice in Jogger Rape Case
by Helen Benedict (published in NEWSDAY, Viewpoint, 10/23/02, p.36)
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Now that new evidence casts doubt on the guilt of the five Harlem men serving time for the rape and beating of the Central Park jogger in 1989, the case is looking like a horrible repetition of this country’s racist history concerning sex crimes.....
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