Of Greatness, Chickenshit, and Who I Owe

So why start a blog?

I’m a professional historian with a Ph.D. from a tier 1 research university in the United States. I’ve recently been sitting on a Master’s Thesis committee for a certain young U.S. Army captain. He’s a smart, thoughtful, self-effacing leader of men; just the kind of person the Army should be producing. Needless to say, I’ve gotten to know him quite a bit because we’ve spent a lot of time discussing his thesis and having a lot of long discussions of the sort that graduate students have with instructors who have taken an interest in their work. This Army captain, who shall remain nameless, graduated from West Point and went on to do three combat tours in Iraq. He was there beginning in 2005, through the Sunni-Shia civil war, serving in Baghdad and elsewhere, and saw some very hard times. He’s shared a bit of them with me, but it’s clear what he will and won’t share. He won’t say how he got them, but he carries the physical scars as proof of how hard those tours of duty were on him, from the tip of his fingers on his left hand all the way up his arm, and around the side of his head. Needless to say, he’s seen hardship I’ll never know, and has earned every millimeter of the military decorations he wears.

When he asked me serve on his thesis committee, I was both honored and terrified. Of course I would do so; it would be the least I could do. But how do you tell someone who’s watched their buddies get horribly, permanently wounded, who’s seen his friends bleed out right in front of him, about the importance of critically reading existing historical literature and fitting his thesis into the existing historiography? Of the significance of clear argumentation using judiciously weighed historical evidence? Of the need for authoritative prose and lucid writing? At that point, how was I to tell him that these things were important?

Paul Fussell, a veteran of World War II and now a literature professor at UPenn, wrote a book years ago called Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. In that book, there is a chapter called “Chickenshit, An Anatomy.” Chickenshit, Fussell argues, is “behavior that makes military life worse than it needs to be … it is small minded and ignoble because it takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.” This was precisely how it felt to sit and critique the chapters written by this Army captain. He has faced war. I have not. The notion that I should have any sort of authority over this brave man felt some days like a bad joke.

But as our relationship opened up, it became clear that we both had something to offer each other. I know some things about a field in which he is interested and needed my help, and whether he knew it or not, he presented me with the opportunity to pay him back in my own small way for his enormous sacrifice. I’m not trained in combat infantry tactics and don’t know anything about keeping a platoon together in a hostile land in the face of extremely difficult circumstances, but I do know how to think critically, to assess evidence and arguments and to praise or call bullshit when it’s warranted; to offer new ideas and hopefully stimulate some thinking. This I can do.

I’m under no illusions about where this project will lead – there are so many good blogs out there that I’ll just be howling into the wilderness, no doubt, but I think I owe it to my friend the Army captain to try. The subject of this blog will be whatever catches my fancy on a given day, but it will mostly revolve around foreign affairs, politics, and culture, and how history can inform our contemporary view of these subjects.

But this blog is my own, and it will partially reflect me, so it will be more than these things. I’ll also be writing the occasional post on music I like, books I’m reading and want to share, my closet wish to be a theoretical physicist, and things I love about the intertubes. I also encourage my friends who have some neat ideas or something interesting to say to come on in as a guest blogger. What are we without our friends?

So those are my more or less vague (but they're clear in my head!) reasons for giving this a shot. I might just put the whole idea to bed in a year, but who knows? For now, I'll just see where things lead.