The Write Stuff

...from Yale (Harvard B.A., an all-girls prep school in Boston before that), uncertain how she might fi t in...

...For him, the fi ner arts complement the martial arts, the general and the humanist are one...

...One semester, a trio of plebes won’t let her alone: “Around whatever corner we met, we would immediately resume discussion about a point left unfi nished in class, about the books they were reading...

...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...

...In Soldier’s Heart, Elizabeth Samet’s memoir of 10 years teaching English at West Point, Patton is, she remarks, a favorite of the cadets, and the same combination happens over and over...

...While Samet’s students beg her to recommend books, when NSSE asked freshmen how many books they had read on their own in the previous year, 24 percent answered “None” while 55 percent opened a measly one-to-four...

...Roman legions under Scipio routed Hannibal’s Carthaginians and ended the Second Punic War...

...She pledges to cross that line of demarcation, and while her colleagues at Ivies and state universities ponder at length their role as teachers in a post9/11 world (always an adversarial role), Samet and West Point have had to act on that question daily from September 12 onward, and they’ve produced an ironic outcome...

...They signify, too, a larger point...

...Jefferson thought the offi cers of the time inclined to aristocracy, and he hoped the curriculum would instruct them in republican principles...

...On a somber afternoon during the North Africa campaign, Patton directs his jeep onto a knoll dotted with ruins, then steps down to resurrect an ancient scene to Omar Bradley (played by Karl Malden) as trumpets echo in the distance...

...Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory, is the author, most recently, of Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906...

...Cadets come from all regions, income groups, and ideologies—some carrying on a family tradition of service, some whose parents protested the Vietnam war...

...This explains why the West Point years have affected Samet so deeply...

...Many other myths about them, too, explode in Samet’s portraits...

...Out of class, they keep at it...

...Still another writes from Mosul, “I have been rolling through books here at a pretty steady clip,” and when he returns to the States, he reports, guiltily, that his reading has slipped...

...The battlefi eld was here...

...All of them, Samet included, “feel a palpable pressure to consider every moment’s practical and moral weight...

...Most of all, belying the Rambo stereotype, they like novels and poems and plays...

...Compare them to students in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a massive annual study of college kids...

...When she gets the job at West Point, a Yale professor informs her, “You’ll humanize them...

...She arrived in 1997, a fresh Ph.D...

...In class they read The Iliad, Beowulf, War and Peace, World War I poetry, and also Pope’s Essay on Man, Dickens’s Bleak House, Matthew Arnold’s “Literature and Science,” the curious lyrics of Wallace Stevens, Diderot’s plan for the Encyclop?die...

...Both of them would agree with the British general William Francis Butler, whose summary opinion about the education of soldiers Samet quotes approvingly: The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fi ghting man and the thinking man is liable to fi nd its fi ghting done by fools and its thinking by cowards...

...How far the literary virtues of West Pointers extend through the armed forces is an open question, but the institutional commitment to books runs deep...

...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 suffi cient vigor...

...He means the Battle of Zama, where in 202 B.C...

...Samet quotes Adams on one rationale: “I was too well informed that most of the offi cers [in the Army] were defi - cient in reading: and I wished to turn the Minds of such as were capable of it, to that great Source of Information...

...To anyone who teaches English elsewhere, the enthusiasm is wondrous...

...Blessed rage for order”—Samet doesn’t have to convince them to respect Shakespeare, Homer, and the rest...

...BY MARK BAUERLEIN Soldier’s Heart Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point by Elizabeth D. Samet Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pp., $23 In Patton, the 1970 fi lm, one of the intriguing traits of the general as played by George C. Scott unfolds not in front of that mammoth American fl ag, or at a party with a lumpish Red Army general, but on a quiet grassy lane in the hills of Tunisia...

...Lieutenants in Iraq who took her course three years earlier write back to ask about her current syllabus...

...I was there,” Patton mutters before reciting lines of his own creation on “the pomp and toils of war . . . the ageold strife . . . when I fought in many guises and many names...

...So much for the anti-intellectualism of military cadets...

...Literature, history, and philosophy matter, and they do so less to students and teachers in the cozy quads of the college campus, ensconced in libraries and symposia, than they do to bedraggled, bored, and anxious offi - cers sweating it out in the desert...

...Another stationed in Korea tells her, “Someone once told me that ‘the most important book you will ever read is the fi rst one after your graduation.’ I wish I could remember what it was—I have done more reading since graduation than I would have ever thought possible...

...Samet’s father remembers the Armed Services Editions, pocket-sized paperbacks of classics and potboilers ranging from Zane Grey to Edna St...

...Today, the Army Library Program maintains kiosks in Iraq, Bosnia, and Afghanistan, along with more than 125 libraries on bases around the world...

...Samet’s chapters ramble from episode to episode, sprinkling refl ections on the war on terror, Guant?namo and Abu Ghraib, and her own frequent place as “the Only Woman in the Room” (a chapter title), but the plebe readers are what hold the book together...

...The prospect throws them into hard questions of life and death, duty and sacrifi ce, courage and leadership, and they probe great works to fi gure them out...

...Samet attributes these young people’s literary fervor precisely to their combat future...

...The war has done that already...

...It was here,” Patton says...

...But when she thinks back upon her Harvard/Yale years, she fi nds them an induction into “doubt and disenchantment,” whereas “West Point won me back to a kind of idealism...

...The commitment goes back to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who authorized the founding of the United States Military Academy in 1802...

...The scene borders on kitsch, but Patton’s historical sense and literary voice save it...

...She fi nds little sexism in the place, either: “Being a woman is immaterial to many of my colleagues...

...In the midst of a major military action, Patton still feels the presence of the past and resorts to poetry to express it...

...Asked in 2006 how often they talk to their professors outside of class, fully 43 percent of fi rst-year students answered “Never,” while 39 percent gave a middling “Sometimes...

...Straight off she saw that “a West Point class is not the gung-ho, red-state monolith an outsider might expect...

...Vincent Millay...

...During World War II, for instance, the Army distributed more than 100 million volumes to the troops...

...The pressure magnifi es the import of Macbeth contemplating the murder of Duncan, Penelope waiting for her husband, Stevens’s “Oh...