No Man's Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-911 America by Elizabeth D. Samet

Author:Elizabeth D. Samet [Samet, Elizabeth D.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780374709013
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

FLOAT LIKE A BUTTERFLY, STING LIKE A BEE

I took advantage of the fact that the Training and Doctrine Command conference was being held at Gettysburg to offer up a Civil War example of the kind of inflexibility I fear: the disagreement between Lee and Longstreet over the Confederate battle plan. The enduring reverence for Lee’s tactical superiority—for his unparalleled ability, as I heard yet another enthusiast exclaim not so long ago, “to do more with less”—is an apologist’s end run around causes and contexts, but Gettysburg also offers an example of Lee’s fallibility.

As James McPherson recounts in his history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom, Lee hoped that Gettysburg would prove the decisive battle that would destroy the Union army. Resisting Longstreet’s repeated pleas that he maneuver around the enemy to get between it and Washington, Lee pointed to Cemetery Hill and declared to his subordinate, “The enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there.” On the second day of the battle, when Longstreet tried again, Lee’s reply was substantially the same, and it evinced the inflexibility that culminated in Pickett’s Charge: “The enemy is there, and I am going to strike him.” Longstreet later wrote of his commander, “In defensive warfare he was perfect. When the hunt was up, his combativeness was overruling.” In a revealing analogy, Shelby Foote likens Lee at Gettysburg to a boxer. Lee resisted Longstreet’s plans and dismissed the objections of Jubal Early because they would have necessitated, in Foote’s words, “a change in his preferred style of fighting … Early was suggesting what amounted to a change of stance, which was neither an easy nor a wise thing for a boxer to attempt, even in training, let alone after a match was under way, as it was now.”

I shared Foote’s parallel with a boxer named Mike, a former army captain who spent much of his time in uniform as a member of the army’s World Class Athlete Program (WCAP), which exists to support Olympic-caliber athletes in uniform. In a reflection of the times, WCAP also now supports an increasing number of wounded soldiers in their quest to become Paralympians. The athletes and their coaches in the program give back in turn to the force at large by participating in the reintegration process: organizing classes and physical training sessions for redeployed units, with a special focus on those soldiers contending with anger issues and PTSD. The reintegration program is animated by the belief that the discipline required to learn a new sport can enhance mental and physical resiliency as well as build trust within units.

I first encountered Mike at West Point, where I advised his senior thesis on boxing and violence in film. I occasionally perplex my students with the revelation that I am a boxing enthusiast and that I learned my love of the sweet science at my mother’s knee. She, in turn, acquired a taste for the sport as a young girl watching Friday Night Fights at her father’s knee.

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