Every Saturday a group of men and women gather at the Brooklyn Vet Center to write their deepest thoughts and feelings. This anthology is a sample of their poetry and prose. While veterans do have shared experiences that we civilians cannot ever fully understand, we are all human beings, we all love and laugh, we all hunger and cry and we all tell stories.

In April of 2010 (National Poetry Month for those of you who don't know this already), we agreed to take part in the annual "Poem-a-Day" Challenge - a project wherein poets (and other brave souls) write at least one poem a day for the entire month of April. There are myriad blogs and websites that encourage posting these poems but being the private people we are, Mary Ellen set up a Wiggio site that only the two of us could view. Here, over the course of the month, we posted a variety of poems - sometimes only one a day, sometimes more. These poems were written during breaks at work, during...