Writing a "Palpable Sensation"

"Some folks want to believe that the writing must have been a wonderful cathartic; "playing all those horror tapes," as one guy put it. But I have not found it so. Writing as therapy, God help us; the world doesn't work that way. Let's just say that both of my war novels were written out of deep bitterness; put another way, the impulse to tell the story of the war rose out of an undeniable authenticity of exhausted, smothered rage, perhaps more bitter than tongue can tell. Someone once asked me why I wrote war novels, and I told him that writing novels was more elegant than a simple "Fuck you."

"My war-year was like a nail in my head, like a corpse in my house, and I wanted it out, but for the longest time now, I have had the unshakable, melancholy understanding that the war will always be vividly present in me, a literal physical, palpable sensation."

From Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam
a memoir by Larry Heinemann