It looks like I’ll be doing a book signing and sale for Soldiers and Civilization at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy Navy Exchange (NEX) on 1 September.  Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing, and of course those who already own copies are invited to stop by to get them signed and maybe for a chat. The NEX is in the underground passageway referred to as “zero deck.” This area is open to Academy visitors. Hours planned are 0730-1630.

I’ll be posting a flyer, confirmation and reminder as we get closer to the date.  Hope to see you there.

I’ve been pretty remiss about posting lately, but I’m going to buck up and post more regularly for awhile. I plan on future posts on the Romans, on some of my recent book acquisitions with some thoughts on books and their uses, on the theory and practice of military prudence, the Early Moderns, running, Dreams and dreams.

For now, I’ll content myself with a short PS to my last post on the Greeks.  I’ll state what is likely obvious by saying that the question posed on the Greeks in that post is a “second order” question as I have previously defined them; I only know part of the answer. In fact, this question on the experience of Greek battle is one that  could benefit from further research and even experimentation. In order to enhance my own understanding of Greek and other ancient battle, I relied heavily on two books that I reference in Soldiers and Civilization.  These are Ancient Warfare: Archaeological Perspectives and The Cutting Edge: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Combat.  These works represent efforts to recreate ancient weapons and fighting techniques.  Additionally, many reenactment groups have tried to simulate the conditions of ancient battle. Teachers and students can use these as resources, and even attempt reenactments of their own. These could be very fun and exciting! Still, as I’ve suggested before, the greater and more interesting challenge than the recreation of the physical or material aspects of ancient combat is in re-imagining the mindset of the combatants, some of it humanly familiar but some very strange.  Greek soldiers went into battle bearing a belief in the gods, in savage rites, in an ancient social order that included slavery, and the whole dramatic, poetic, tragic basis of Greek civilization.

Can we think like this, or at least imagine what it would have been like to think like this?Do we want to? There are dark places in the mind of ancient Greece where we might prefer not to venture, but the journey could cast light on our own dark places, on aspects of humanity that the Greeks were more comfortable publicly exposing and enacting than are we of a more sanitized age. Battle can be an avatar for getting inside the Greek mind. To know the Greeks better is to better understand ourselves, and this, as Socrates and the Delphic oracle contend, is the knowledge most worth having.

The Teaching Guide has 8 questions on Chapter 1, “Greeks and Macedonians: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Phalanx.” Question 7 asks, “Can we imagine what it would have been like to train as a hoplite, to exercise leadership as a Greek commander, to fight in a phalanx?” I sometimes refer to this type of question as a “time machine.”  The past is a very strange place, and the remote past may be almost unknowable, but perhaps we can, by an effort of imagination and empathy, by stressing the human essentials, make at least an honorable effort at understanding history as it was experienced by those who lived it.

When asking a time machine question, I encourage students to use what may be like experiences to approach the subject. In this case, an experience of contact sports, military drill in formation, of any highly taxing physical effort may help us to get closer. If the sport involved the wearing of protective equipment, so much the better. Of course, if any students are veterans, this can give them a special insight.  I recall the part of Bill Mauldin’s WWII memoir, Up Front in which he tries to describe the experience of the infantryman to a civilian. Fill a suitcase with rocks; walk around the neighborhood with it all day; come home and dig a hole in your backyard; stay in it all night, trying to stay awake with thoughts that someone is going to come out of the darkness, beat you over the head, attack your family and rob your house (etc.)  Across the years and even the centuries, the experience of fear and fatigue, of trying to stay on top of a situation getting out of control, of acting both in unison and as an individual in a rough and dirty game, have not changed to be unrecognizable.  Next time you march in formation, imagine at the end of the march you’ll be launched into a deadly, hand-to-hand fight. Imagine your worst football, rugby, hockey, or lacrosse game. OK, imagine 10 times rougher, the stakes much higher, friends who never walk off the field.

Away from the classroom, the reading of history and literature can have an influence on how military life is experienced.  The sand berms, body armor and helmets, even our location in the land of the Tigris and Euphrates constantly reminded me of the Roman Legions when I was in Iraq, so that I named my OIF-1 monograph “Desert Legion.” Even more vivid and lasting were my thoughts of Homer’s “wine dark sea” one time flying over the Mediterranean in a CH-53.  On this occasion, I was flying back to my own vessel the Bataan leaving the task force flag ship Kearsarge.  This was 2003. We were headed to Kuwait and Iraq.  I’d gone to the Kearsarge to get some interviews I needed in my role as field historian. The Marine task force operations officer, a Basic School classmate, had done me the honor of briefing me on the tentative plan of attack and asking for for comments. On the flight  back, I had the thought that, yes, we were going to do this: we’re going to invade Iraq, one way or another. Then I had my Homer moment. The aircraft banked and I caught a glimpse of the dark sea over the rear ramp.  I thought of all the fighting ships and men who had passed this way: Homer’s (or Helen’s) 1,000 ships, galleys and galleons, men of war, dreadnoughts, escorts and merchantmen in convoy.  My part had been written long ago, and all I needed to do was play that part. The worse things got, the more I might be needed, to help and encourage, as long as I remained standing.  These thoughts stayed with me the rest of the campaign.

Maybe the best way to get inside the head of a Greek hoplite is to read Homer and some of the Greek plays that deal with war, like Sophocles’s Ajax. That was what they carried in their heads on the way to battle, along with thoughts of home and family, the fight ahead, their own chances of victory and survival, as have soldiers in every age.

Teaching Guide for SAC

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a teaching guide for SAC. With this posting, I attach above a somewhat revised version of the guide and start to answer some of my own questions, addressing the discussion questions that I wrote for each chapter.

I write three types of discussion questions: those to which I think I have the answer (these are generally firmly rooted in the text), those that I have handle on, but think I might be missing part of the complete answer, and those that address matters that have me sincerely puzzled or that just run past what I consider to be my own knowledge of the subject.  I tend to ask more of the first two types when talking to undergrads, the latter categories with older students, like the field grade officers of my Command and Staff seminars. I must say that even some of the first order questions turn out to be not so simple.  Still, the third order questions tend to be the most interesting and productive.

Among the  discussion questions for the introductory chapter of SAC, I would count question 2 (“For what kind of audience do you think this book was written?”) as a third order question. When I started writing SAC, I definitely was thinking of an audience of officers and future officers, people who looked like Kings Point midshipmen or my Command and Staff students.  As I continued writing, however, I realized that one of the main ideas running through the book was the inter-dependency of civil and military society.  Even significant military reform, I concluded, was difficult and limited if it did not involve civil society in some way.  The military reforms envisioned by French enlightenment thinkers, for example, could not happen until after the Revolution.  On the other hand, civil-military relations is a day to day concern of military members much more than of civil society.  Few civilians wake up in the morning wondering how well they support or understand the military, but many officers are routinely concerned, and even worried, about their relations with civil society.

The ideal class or discussion group for SAC might be a mix of civilian and military.  Their interests might be somewhat different, with the civilians more interested in historic and literary aspects of the book, and the military types looking for ideas about leadership and warfighting.  Another theme of the book, however, is the role of the humanities in military education. In fact, I make the claim that the profession of arms is an interdisciplinary branch of the humanities, so the study of leadership and literature, for example, might not be so far removed from one another.  In a way, how the question of an audience is answered is a test of some of the important claims made by SAC.

I’d be very interested to hear how a class of officers, civilians, or a mix of the two might respond to this discussion question.  Does this book feel like it is speaking to you? As the forgoing discussion will indicate, I’m really not sure how they would answer.