A live-streamed event on Nov. 12 with readings by CD Collins, Fred Marchant, and Regie Gibson, and remarks from author Askold Melnyczuk and President Emerita Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust.

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—A transcript of the opening remarks by Honorary Chair Drew Gilpin Faust—

I grew up in a world and a family shaped by war. The very name given my generation—Baby Boomers—defined us as part of war’s aftermath. The pictures proudly displayed on tables in our living room were of my father, uncles, and grandfathers in uniform.

I am not old enough to have experienced the First World War, but its effects on my family were profound. My great grandfather was a general on the Western front in the middle of the punishing battles of fall 1918 when he learned his only son, my great uncle, an early Navy flier, had been killed. The family was never the same again. My grandmother, his surviving daughter, wrote her father: “The wrong one has been left behind.” There would be no one to carry on the family name. She spent the rest of her life certain in the knowledge that, as she put it, “a girl isn’t the same.”

And a little more than two decades later, she would send her sons off to war. My father was wounded and decorated as part of Patton’s Third Army in France. He would regard his military service as the most important moment of his life. What came later—children, family, work—were always an afterthought. Fifty years later, in his college reunion publication, he said that in the course of his life there would be “NOTHING like it again.”

My experience with war—this multi generational force—was a different though perhaps no less defining one. Vietnam and seemingly endless protests became the centerpiece of my college generation and led me to devote a scholarly career to trying to understand why human beings come to do such terrible things to one another.

I grew up with war stories. My family’s of course. But these merged seamlessly with the war stories of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where we lived. I galloped around the woods near our house playing Civil War soldiers with my brothers. And I always had to be Grant because my older brother insisted on being Virginia’s consummate hero, Robert E. Lee.

War is seductive. It is, as Hemingway said, ”the best story of all.” We are captured by its drama, its heroism; its consequence. As North Vietnamese soldier and writer Bao Ninh put it in his powerful novel, The Sorrow of War, “We cannot stop telling war stories.” We grapple to understand this terrible human invention and the way it reveals the human, the inhuman and the superhuman and the boundaries that do and don’t separate them. Looking at the destruction wrought by the battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, Lee is said to have remarked, “It is well war is so terrible else we would grow too fond of it.”

But war stories don’t just reflect and report war. They come to shape it. They can empower those who grow too fond of it, those who embrace its drama and heroism and overlook its terrible cost. Euphemisms can help alert us when that is happening. When soldiers become “warriors,” watch out. War stories become instructional manuals for how to be a man. The writer Ron Kovic was captivated by such a war story when John Wayne’s movie exploits inspired him to enlist in the Marines fresh out of high school. Kovic went to Vietnam to become a hero. Instead, he became a paraplegic and wrote about the war stories that had betrayed him in the now classic novel Born on the Fourth of July. I think of the words of another great novelist of the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien: “War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”

Our nation is telling dangerous war stories right now—celebrations of “lethality” and of a “warrior” ethos of killing and aggressive masculinity, of lives that seem not to matter as anything more than bodies to be counted. We need to remember what the great writers of war—from Homer to Tim O’Brien or Bao Ninh or Phil Klay—have always known about what lies behind war’s lure and fascination.

It matters which stories we tell about war, for in the struggle to capture war’s complexity—both its fascination and its cruelty—lies the only possible path towards truth—and thus towards peace. This is the work of literature, with its capacity for encompassing ambiguity and contradiction and for showing humans whole, in their heights and in their depths. In fact, what we know as literature was originally born out of the war stories of ancient times. Writers must continue to strive to tell the true war stories of the present and future for in those stories rests the possibility for peace.