Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point
By Elizabeth Samet
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 259 pages, $23
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., is known for forging strong, silent types. Fortunately, among them is a strong, deeply articulate type, Elizabeth Samet, who, in her insightful "Soldier's Heart," gives us some provocative glimpses into the military mind-set. We come away from the book with respect for the academy's goals, if not all of its customs, and with hope in and concern for the humanity of our armed forces under a civilian leadership that has too often sent them on injudicious missions.
Samet has been an English professor at the officers' academy for a decade, and her worldview is steeped in literature, a single paragraph touching on the works of Sigmund Freud, Heinrich von Kleist, Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Wilfred Owen -- and filmmaker Michael Cimino. But here she also acts as an anthropologist, doing field work in the heart of an exotic society largely unknown to so many of us.
An interesting subtheme is Samet's ambivalence toward her campus and its purposes. On the one hand, the school cleanses her, she writes, of a wearying, knee-jerk cynicism and relativism in mainstream academe. On the other hand, it crowds her to the point where she shares her students' sense of living in a panopticon (English philosopher Jeremy Bentham's concept of a prison whose inmates are always observable, if not always observed).
The book is really a series of linked essays: on how the Army has changed since her father's World War II generation; on the power of ideas and literature within its ranks; on being a woman in the Army's traditionally male-dominated world; on the nature of obedience; on Christian fundamentalism in the services; and on the essence of soldiers' courage and sacrifice.
Peppered throughout are sketches of memorable students and colleagues, a few of whom come to sad ends in the Iraq war, about which Samet reveals her views early on. "I remain unconvinced," she writes, "by any of the stated reasons given for the invasion . . . and dismayed by its civilian architects' apparently cavalier lack of foresight."
If that surprises us, she suggests that it shouldn't. As she describes them, West Point's faculty, 22 percent of whom are civilians with PhDs, are a more-diverse bunch than you'd guess, as are their students:
"A West Point class is not the gung-ho, red-state monolith an outsider might expect. I've known of cadets who grew up in apartments on Manhattan's Upper East Side and cadets who spent part of their childhood on the streets; cadets who were Eagle Scouts and cadets who played in garage bands; cadets whose fathers are ministers and cadets whose fathers have long ago disappeared; cadets from families with a tradition of military service dating back to the nineteenth century and cadets whose parents protested the Vietnam War."
Samet explains, regarding her own background, that like poet Randall Jarrell, whose "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" she teaches, her father served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. He shared stories of his service, and he watched with Samet war movies on TV, from "To Hell and Back" to "Patton." As a graduate student at Yale University, Samet studied Ulysses S. Grant's "Personal Memoirs," including his own ambivalent memories of West Point. When she saw an ad in 1996 for an assistant professorship there, she was intrigued.
"West Point," she writes, "conjured up neither the vision of jackbooted government thugs nor the plot of Seven Days in May, in which a military cabal, sickened by the softness of civilian leadership, attempts a coup." Amusingly, she also nods to her education at the exclusive Winsor School for girls as not inappropriate preparation for life at a military academy, given the institutions' shared reverence for tradition and indoctrination.
She suggests that to the extent she did fear cabals, they were of the condescending Ivy League variety. At Yale, she writes, "departments felt like islands unto themselves. Seminars that drew students from different programs occasionally had the atmosphere of armed camps."
In contrast, "one of the oddest things about an army is that when it isn't getting you killed it works with enormous zeal to take care of you. . . . [I]f my undergraduate years launched me into skepticism and graduate school took me deeper still into waters of doubt and disenchantment, West Point won me back to a kind of idealism."
She has grown accustomed to the often-snide remarks from civilians when they learn where she teaches (" 'You mean they read?' "), and amused by "friends and relatives" who "imagine that, by working in a military environment, I have become a master logician," particularly skilled at map reading and furniture moving.
So what, then, is her function there, as the military types phrase it? She answers: "Even, perhaps especially, those plebes who begin English 102 with a conviction that poetry can have nothing whatever to do with soldiering come away with a recognition of the long-standing connections between literature and war and of the role of poetry in shaping culture, attitudes, and values." Those connections, she argues, can incorporate the grim skepticism of the Jarrell poem and the chivalry of Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte D'Arthur." Samet cites C.S. Lewis' proposition that "we read to know we are not alone." And she hopes that "one day, perhaps -- in Baghdad, in a village of Afghanistan, in some remote outpost that none of us can anticipate," her students, too, "will read to know they are not alone."
She has persuasive evidence that they do -- for instance, correspondence from a former student, Joey, who, in Iraq or between assignments, devours books by Bernard Lewis, Pablo Neruda, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Krauss. A "country boy," Joey was nonetheless a walking argument against cadet stereotyping, writing his thesis on the poetry of Anne Sexton between his rugby games and weight lifting.
In the essay "Becoming Penelope, the Only Woman in the Room," Samet discusses how she dislikes being assumed to have an instant woman-to-woman bond with female cadets, or being expected to play either the stern or indulgent mother figure to her students generally. But, she writes, the war has put her in the position of Odysseus' wife, "who sits at home waiting for news of soldiers. . . . I can tell myself I'm not a mother -- not a listener and a watcher left behind," but "the fates have conspired to cast me in the most ancient woman's role of all."
In the chapter on obedience, she elucidates an Army ideal of its leaders, as the Army Officer's Guide puts it, having an independence of judgment " 'wrapped within a full, disciplined understanding of the legal and moral impact of decisions.' " At Valley Forge, Samet points out, George Washington defended "troops' right to send letters of complaint to Congress." Her prized subject, Grant, praised Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's troops as " 'better than any European soldiers, because they not only worked like a machine but the machine thought.' "
Samet clearly concurs with those who find proselytizing in the ranks inappropriate, but her analysis of Christian fundamentalism is more complex than that. She finds in the fervor of some officers' faith a balm for, and a parallel to, service with the uncertainties of being Grant's thinking machines in the employ of fickle Washington bosses. Soldiers must "reconcile duty with the apparent fact, for example, that there are no weapons of mass destruction hiding in the Iraqi desert. . . . [T]he nation's civilian leadership is supposed to make it possible for soldiers to take a lot of things, including the reasons they go to war, on faith."
Courage is a similarly loaded notion, and Samet emphasizes the degree to which moral courage is taught at West Point alongside the physical courage of the playing field and the battlefield. That moral courage, she says, is the kind embodied by Capt. Ian Fishback, who in a 2005 open letter to U.S. Sen. John McCain in The Washington Post decried the murkiness of America's rules of engagement in Iraq. That confusion, he wrote " 'contributed to a wide range of abuses.' " At West Point, he had vowed " 'that my men would never commit a dishonorable act; that I would protect them from that type of burden. It absolutely breaks my heart that I have failed some of them in this regard.' "
Samet's book title comes from early 20th Century terminology for a certain symptomology among veterans that, with its tell-tale trauma, guilt, sorrow and exhaustion could, even then, be differentiated from "ordinary heart disease." Samet's personal casualty list includes two colleagues, Maj. William F. Hecker III, whose vehicle was blown up by an improvised explosive device, and Col. Theodore S. Westhusing, who committed suicide in his trailer in Baghdad. Westhusing had been helping train Iraqi security forces and "couldn't seem to reconcile his own conceptions of honorable service with what he was witnessing: the large amounts of money changing hands, the role of private contractors, the nature of the mission itself." He had, it might be said, a fatal case of soldier's heart.
In the era of the all-volunteer force, with no draft to randomly choose soldiers, most of us are distanced from that condition. Samet argues:
"Television, embedded reporting, and videography have turned the rest of us into war's insulated voyeurs, the assiduous consumers of the sounds and sights of death. While technology creates an illusion of intimacy, the consumption of the war as a spectacular movie arouses our pity but does nothing to enlarge our sympathies."
I think Samet might be selling those other media short. But there's no question that this book brings us a little closer and enlarges those sympathies in an admirable literary and historical framework that helps bridge the military-civilian divide. I hope her work finds its way to more than a few Capitol Hill nightstands.
-Alexander C. Kafka
Reprinted from the Chicago Tribune