Literature as Handbook for the Genteel Warrior

Posted on September 28, 2007
Filed Under Poetry, Politics |

That is what Elizabeth D. Samet appears to have written in her forthcoming book, excerpted here in the NY Times Magazine. I find her her eerie coolness about the Iraq War deeply unsettling. I suppose it is a good thing that the young officers she describes carry Wallace Stevens or Andrew Marvell into the gibbering moral idiocy of Baghdad with them. A tolerance for ambiguity of the sort one learns from poetry might also serve as a kind of restraint against the military culture of certitude, I suppose. Samet’s accounts are full of budding noblesse oblige, but all the Stevens & Marvell in the world doesn’t change the truth, as Tim O’Brien (an infantryman) put it in “How to Tell a True War Story” — “Send young men to war and they come home talking dirty.”