In 1987 I took an intense class called "The Experience of War" at Macalester College. It was team taught by Robert Ward and Paul Solon, a literature professor and History professor respectively. We studied the Peloponnesian war, the Hundred Years War, World War I, World War II, Vietnam. We watched movies from The Deer Hunter to Aliens, read The Thin Red Line, Goodbye To All That, Froissart, read oral histories, led discussions, wrote papers. I think we met for 8 hours per week and I was in a constant state of trying to keep up with the reading and struggling to say something worthwhile in class. I was a terrible student, but the class had a lasting effect. As someone said, you go to college not to actually read, but to find out what you should read for the rest of your life.
We were reading The War by Marguerite Duras. It is a memoir by a French woman and member of the French resistance who divorced her emaciated concentration camp survivor husband immediately after the war. I announced in class that she had a duty to stay with him, to the vocal shock and dismay of the rest of the class. I felt terrible and had to leave campus for 24 hours to recover.
At another point some student naively asked, "what is a Stuka?" and Todd R., the military nut in the class blurted out, "German dive bomber, very fast, very deadly!" I guffawed at his intensity and got a glare from one of the professors. I wrote two papers for that class. In one, I examined how humans form non-human entities or structures to fight wars and how this was reflected in the observations and literary output of people who participated. The other paper sucked to hard to mention here. Ever since, I have had a third paper kicking around in my brain. My great unwritten masterpiece is about demobilization, a topic as important today as it was during the Hundred Years War. Planners and historians have written about it quite a bit. I will compare and contrast different attempts at troop demobilization and their effects on society after a war. The work in progress lives here.
3:49:46 PM 
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