“Soldier’s Heart” | life lessons and military life
“Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature through Peaceand War at West Point”
by Elizabeth D. Samet
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 259 pp., $23
When Elizabeth Samet was at Yale working toward her Ph.D. in literature, she took her subject very seriously. Later, when she was hired to teach at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, she learned from her students just how serious a matter literature can be.
In “Soldier’s Heart,” she tells of her years teaching young men and women for whom the psychological and ethical issues of a Shakespeare play are much more than engaging diversions. “Literature helps them to understand their own increasingly complicated lives,” Samet writes, and she finds herself stimulated and humbled by their “courageous attempts to bridge active and contemplative selves.” A student confides that he can’t muster the fervor for combat that many of his classmates profess, and Samet suddenly sees her own task in a new light, as the job of giving people the mental and emotional tools to make sense of their conflicted world.
Samet’s language can be stilted at times, perhaps the effect of too many academic conferences, but the clarity of her vision and her respect for her colleagues and students are unmistakable. Acknowledging that her years in graduate school taught her doubt, skepticism and disenchantment, she says, “West Point won me back to a kind of idealism.” She learns “the worth of community and commitment” and of “surrendering myself to a shared mission”
With every anecdote, she reveals as much about her own education into that shared mission as about her teaching. She recalls watching a plebe wrestle with a seemingly trivial dilemma: Having lost his hat and facing the prospect of walking hatless across the quad (an utterly forbidden breach of decorum), he has found someone else’s hat hanging on a rack. He has to decide whether to take it and thus leave a classmate with the same problem that he is struggling with. He decides to leave the hat. Such a small matter - and yet she has witnessed a young man’s refusal to believe that moral considerations fall away somewhere along the scale of importance. She hopes that her students can finish their four years with such “perfectly calibrated moral compasses.”
“Courage isn’t something I used to think about except in an abstract or platitudinous way,” she writes, but even an incident like the plebe’s hat problem reminds her that courage is part of her students’ curriculum. As she puts it, “To teach at an institution that also has as its mission the cultivation of a specific set of values and virtues - duty, honor, country - and that prepares its graduates for military service is always to feel a palpable pressure to consider every moment’s practical and moral weight.”
And the lessons (and tests) don’t stop with graduation. Samet stays in touch with many of her students as they do their tours of duty. When she began teaching at West Point in the ’90s, their exchanges took place against “a distant backdrop of war”; after Sept. 11, 2001, the correspondence took on a new urgency. What reading do you recommend to occupy hours and days of excruciating boredom that might erupt at any second into violence and mortal danger? She finds herself promoting literature “as a kind of elixir” that will help them find “a particular kind of courage and a particular kind of knowing.”
One would think that there are few places more distant from one another than the literature classroom and the battlefield. “Soldier’s Heart” shows us that by some measures, at least, that distance is very small indeed.