Elizabeth Samet has written a memoir about her ten years spent teaching English at West Point where all her stereotypes about officers were exploded and where she found a great hunger among the students for literature.
Samet attributes these young people's literary fervor precisely to their combat future. While freshmen down in Manhattan at Columbia and NYU think about jobs and paychecks they'll secure after graduation, and hook-ups they make before it, cadets have a rigorous regimented existence in class and out, and they know they will assume command of 30 men and women when it's over, probably in a hot zone. The prospect throws them into hard questions of life and death, duty and sacrifice, courage and leadership, and they probe great works to figure them out.
All of them, Samet included, "feel a palpable pressure to consider every moment's practical and moral weight." The pressure magnifies the import of Macbeth contemplating the murder of Duncan, Penelope waiting for her husband, Stevens's "Oh! Blessed rage for order"--Samet doesn't have to convince them to respect Shakespeare, Homer, and the rest. The war has done that already.
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When she thinks back upon her Harvard/Yale years, she finds them an induction into "doubt and disenchantment," whereas "West Point won me back to a kind of idealism." She finds little sexism in the place, either: "Being a woman is immaterial to many of my colleagues." And while the 1960s counterculture "helped to make the American soldier come to seem a rather strange and exotic creature to many civilians: an anachronistic conformist," Samet encounters "outrageous, uncompromising individuals" and "arch-rebels," and alumni remain "concerned that cadets' minds be exercised with sufficient vigor."
"Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point" (Elizabeth D. Samet)
Posted by Jill Fallon at December 27, 2007 12:50 PM | PermalinkI often come across accounts (although none of book length - most are magazine article length) where people who know nothing about the military are stunned to find that soldiers are intelligent, caring people - not just robot killers that grunt.
It's very sad that so many people get their ideas of what these men and women are like from Hollywood - they who give us Sylvester Stallone's Rambo as the example of a "soldier". Right.
I'll have to check the book out, I'm glad she wrote it. Maybe it will spread the word a bit about our military and the type of people who honorably serve our country.
Posted by: Teresa at December 28, 2007 5:11 PM