In her new book, No Man’s Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America, West Point literature professor Elizabeth Samet reflects on the experience of teaching moral and critical wisdom to soldiers who, in Elliot Ackerman’s words, “are not challenged by the imminent combat they will face upon graduation, but by a middling sort of peace, serving a nation at war but not at war”. Ackerman praises the book, calling it an “expertly rendered meditation on a decade of war through the lens of the literature she teaches”:
In the next decade, the U.S. military’s greatest challenge won’t likely be the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or the draw down in Afghanistan, but how it navigates the no man’s land Samet references. When reflecting on the plebes Samet has taught and seen off to war she writes: “I know from their e-mails and letters that some of my former students cling to the memory of their classroom experience as to a kind of life raft when they find themselves confused or numbed in places of true peril.” Clearly the study of literature, if not directly transferable to a hard military skill, has armed Samet’s students against the vagaries of war. But she also notes that in the coming no man’s land, such pursuits might prove essential in cultivating the type of intellectual flexibility required to meet our muddled peace, and the uncertain challenges of the next war. “It takes patience and courage to carve out space for self-examination. … If you’ve waited until you are a general to develop it, it will be too late.”
In an interview with Francis Wilkinson, Samet touches on the unique role that literature has come to play in many of her former students’ lives as soldiers:
The exigent circumstances of war somehow stimulate a hunger for imaginative literature and sharpen the ability to recognize correspondences between art and life. Those are meaningful correspondences, and often contradictions or collisions, rather than the sometimes facile analogies and identifications readers tend to make in the less generous and curious moods that come upon us when living life at a more normal pace.
Perhaps we can experience, in attenuated fashion, something of what it means to be a reader in war when we travel to new places or find ourselves in uncomfortable circumstances. That’s why I can remember where and when I have read certain books: all of the novels of Evelyn Waugh while living on my own in Scotland for a year; or “Madame Bovary,” on tape during a surreal car ride with a 103-degree fever, in a kind of delirium, begging Emma, “Please, take the arsenic.” The swirling dynamics of chance that dominate war, and the long stretches of unaccountable boredom, have turned many soldiers of my acquaintance into voracious readers.
The Dish 