Lieutenant Colonel JB Brown didn't really mind being pipped at the post by Angelina Jolie. He had been set to grace the front page of the Sunday Times Magazine, but at the last minute a celebrity story bumped him off. Never mind; the story was still published inside the magazine, and that was what mattered.
The article was the brainchild of Cathy Galvin, the magazine's deputy editor and a director of a charity supporting poetry education. She asked the Ministry of Defence to help find 'the war poets of today'. Lt Col Brown, Commanding Officer of 7 Transport Regiment Royal Logistic Corps, was just one who came forward.
As a soldier with a 21-year career behind him, he knows all about war and has lived through things that most of us cannot imagine. Poetry, he feels, is a good way of trying to explain what war is like. He thanks his grandfather, who used to be an English teacher, for planting the literary seed:
"He got me going, and introduced me to poetry," said Lt Col Brown. "It sparked something in me and I started writing when I was 18. Looking back at the early stuff, I realise why most of it didn't get published. But I can also see that the genesis of what I'd become was there.
"My early stuff tended to be full of teenage angst," he says. "I felt I knew everything in the universe. But I now feel that, as a poet, life experience counts for a lot.
"True, poets like Wilfred Owen were young when they wrote, but because they were caught up in a trauma so advanced, their experiences made them old beyond their years. There is a correspondence between age and quality of writing."
The themes that shoot through his work today are the same as they were when he was young:
"I have always written about human emotions, religion and war," he says.
Now, however, he has his time on active service to draw upon:
"I feel a need to explain what it's like to be a soldier. I've been in situations that normal people don't face."
Lt Col Brown believes that poetry is both catharsis and communication, and he is convinced that writing, be it poetry or prose, is a good way of relieving post-traumatic stress disorder, the hugely debilitating mental and emotional syndrome that blights too many veterans' lives:
"Writing adds to the collective memory, and it helps people to deal with what they have seen and done," he says.
The Imperial War Museum is taking a keen interest in the experiences of current servicemen and women as expressed through their writings, and Lt Col Brown is helping with this project.
As well as encouraging other soldiers to write, he hopes to get an anthology published. A step towards his goal was being invited to read his work at an event hosted by the museum, alongside Brian Turner, a former US Marine, whose book 'Here, Bullet' is a widely acclaimed collection of poems about the Iraq war. It was the first time he had recited in public, but he felt it went very well:
"Poets tend to wear their hearts on their sleeves," he says. "I'll see something, or hear a phrase, and it will spark something off, and I have to write. It can happen anywhere, anytime. Sometimes it's about telling people what soldiers go through, and their emotions. My experiences are a natural catalyst for writing.
"I am a poet and a soldier. There's a symbiotic relationship between the two vocations, which has stretched back hundreds of years. There's a whole panoply of human drama."
Does the Colonel's poetry raise any eyebrows in this macho world where communication tends to be a barked order with onions on its breath? If so, he doesn't care:
"Some are genuinely surprised, some are quietly impressed by what I do. It's an individual thing, if people don't want to read my stuff, or they don't like it, that's OK; don't read it."
This article by Ian Carr first featured in the May 2009 issue of Defence Focus magazine - For everyone in Defence.