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.”
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