Military Cadences

Why American soldiers in Iraq read Wallace Stevens.

SOLDIER'S HEART

Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point

By Elizabeth D. Samet

Farrar Straus Giroux. 259 pp. $23

This past August, when U.S. News & World Report published its 2008 college rankings, many of my humanities colleagues here at the Naval Academy expressed equal parts of astonishment and pride upon learning that our institution had tied -- with Oberlin -- as the #20 liberal arts college. (Our sibling rival West Point tied with Colby for #22.) A senior administrator was "amused" by the ranking, and allegedly many alumni, in good alumni form, voiced their disapproval. Number 5 in engineering, that was to be expected. But liberal arts? Why are they even considering us in that category? Are we training war fighters -- or fostering dreamers?

Now along comes Soldier's Heart, a book that marches straight into the fray and challenges "those who would prefer to imagine West Point as a kind of modern-day Sparta, where training and discipline trump creativity and independence of mind and spirit." Not that its author, Elizabeth D. Samet, who has been a civilian English professor at Army since 1997, doesn't value military discipline; the cadets she admires in this densely packed memoir are ramrod straight, "polite with a vengeance" and intensely prepared for the wars on their horizon. She boasts of the grueling hours of marching that a student must endure for skipping her class. But after reminding us that Sparta's exclusive focus on war was "part of what destroyed the city in the end," she turns our attention to the expansive wishes of Adams and Jefferson, who hoped that West Point would, in Samet's words, instill "a sense of civic responsibility as well as technical precision in its graduates."

It's through the study of literature, in all of its ambiguity, that Samet's cadets explore "civic responsibility," among other virtues. For instance, in a gesture that expands her students' understanding of the Army's official "Soldier's Creed" -- first among whose main tenets is the vow to "always place the mission first" -- Samet examines Nikolay Rostov from Tolstoy's War and Peace. This ensign's critical faculties go blooey when the czar, whom he loves, makes peace with the French, whom Rostov has been ordered to "hack . . . to pieces." While Rostov can retreat into his simplest sense of "duty," the literature student is obligated to weigh all the options. By struggling through murky problems like this one, cadets develop, as Samet puts it, "the extraordinary capacity to criticize and reason, on the one hand, and to retain their faith [in the nation's civilian leadership], on the other." Elsewhere she equates such a capacity with "courage."

Literature upgrades the cadets' ethics for wartime; it also reboots the right sides of their brains. In counterbalance to the rates, codes, formulae and acronyms that they must be ready to call out on command (according to Army's century-old "Thayer Method" of learning) are texts that demand the keenest deliberation. Elizabethan verse slows their charging minds down. Victorian novels make them hold their focus. Many of Samet's graduates deploy directly to the desert, where the sandstorms (and fog) of war replace their regimental lives in the lush Hudson Valley. Having been initiated into the mysteries of literary criticism, her best students don't squander their downtime in playing Halo but rather in devouring crates full of books -- Aeschylus, Coetzee, back issues of Poetry. Andy, in Iraq, finds comfort in Wallace Stevens, the notoriously elusive modernist poet who "seemed to give Andy a way of imposing discipline on his 'dust-infused mind.' " Stevens's notion of the "Blessed rage for order" may describe the rectilinear reality of West Point, but "what Andy confronted in Iraq had none of this soothing regularity, and in Stevens he found someone else wrestling with a language that might shape unruly experience."

Soldier's Heart is an exhilarating read. It seats you in the classroom of a feisty professor who commands several fronts with easy expertise: classic film, ancient Greece, Shakespearean tragedy, modern poetry. And it seats you elbow-to-elbow with an elite crop of students whose intelligence and imagination match their courage. Literature works wonders in building fellowship, whether it forms between soldiers, colleagues or cultures. When Nick, a cadet-turned-pilot, found that he and his chief of aviation maintenance shared an interest in William Blake, they reread the poet's Marriage of Heaven and Hell"in preparation for their next field exercise." Samet's colleague Al, while on combat deployment, found friendly ground with an Afghan colonel in the works of a 13th-century Persian poet: "Rumi gave us a point of contact in our respective imaginations; he convinced us that we were more alike than unalike."

Literature has always taken the backseat in America's can-do culture, a fact that puts us out of sync with much of the world. "It is almost sure to be the case," Samet argues, "that poetry is more important to the cultures with which U.S. troops will come in contact -- to those of our allies and our enemies -- than it is to our own." If we accept Samet's line of reasoning, then, a thorough training in literature could only prepare cadets (and midshipmen) to be better equipped as both envoys and warriors. *

John Beckman, an associate professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, is the author of "The Winter Zoo."