Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point

by Elizabeth D. Samet

What does literature - particularly the literature of war - mean to a student who is likely to encounter its reality? What is the best way to stir uninhibited classroom discussions in a setting that is designed to train students to follow orders, respect authority, and survive grueling physical and mental experiences? This is the terrain Samet traverses each semester, a challenge beautifully captured in Soldier's Heart. The excerpt ends with an extensive list of recommended books and films.

Elizabeth D. Samet and her students learned to romanticize the army "from the stories of their fathers and from the movies." For Samet, it was the old World War II movies she used to watch on TV, while her students grew up on Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. Unlike their teacher, however, these students, cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, have decided to turn make-believe into real life.

West Point is a world away from Yale, where Samet attended graduate school and where nothing sufficiently prepared her for teaching literature to young men and women who were training to fight a war. Intimate and poignant, Soldier's Heart chronicles the various tensions inherent in that life as well as the ways in which war has transformed Samet's relationship to literature. Fighting in Iraq, Samet's former students share what books and movies mean to them—the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, or the films of James Cagney. Their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom.

Samet arrived at West Point before September 11, 2001, and has seen the academy change dramatically. In Soldier's Heart, she reads this transformation through her own experiences and those of her students. Forcefully examining what it means to be a civilian teaching literature at a military academy, Samet also considers the role of women in the army, the dangerous tides of religious and political zeal roiling the country, the uses of the call to patriotism, and the cult of sacrifice she believes is currently paralyzing national debate. Ultimately, Samet offers an honest and original reflection on the relationship between art and life.

Genres: Nonfiction, Military Fiction, Memoir, History, War, Books About Books, Literature

259 pages, Hardcover

First published October 16, 2007

About the author

Elizabeth D. Samet received her BA from Harvard and her PhD in English literature from Yale. She is the author of Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776–1898 and Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature through Peace and War at West Point. Samet has been an English professor at West Point for ten years.

Reviews

[Connie G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elizabeth D Samet became a civilian literature professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Much of the literature mentioned in the book has some connection with warriors, with a strong emphasis on poetry in the first year's class. Readings ranged from "The Odessey" to Wilfred Owne's World War I poetry to Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" to Dickens' "Bleak House" with its thoughts on philanthropy. Samat also taught senior seminars on various themes, including some film studies classes.

The literature and films gave the cadets food for thought on courage, honor, leadership, loyalty, following orders, following your conscience, religion, sacrifice, PTSD, physical injury, and death. While West Point is very regimented, individual personalities and concerns emerged as Samet got to know the cadets.

The title, "Soldier's Heart," has a double meaning. We associated the word "heart" with camaraderie and love. "Soldier's Heart" was also a World War I expression for post traumatic stress disorder which can have symptoms that can mimic cardiac distress.

It was very impressive how many new officers kept in touch with Samet by e-mail after they graduated and were deployed to the Middle East and other locations. Their former teacher was very generous about boxing up books to send to her avid readers.

This was a thoughtful look at the preparation at a military academy, and of possible conflicts between patriotism and ethics that might arise in these new soldiers. The cadets were being taught to follow orders, but also to be intelligent leaders. Samet's classes seemed to be designed to encourage deep thinking. 4.5 stars, rounded up.

[Don Gerstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

What we now call PTSD was originally treated as a heart malady during the Civil War, when physicians interpreted the symptoms to be linked to cardiovascular disease. The psychosomatic cause would not be identified until many years later, and the soldiers were diagnosed as suffering from “disorderly action of the heart,” referred to during World War I as “soldier’s heart.” Elizabeth D. Samet discusses this and other subjects with West Point as the backdrop. At the time of publication, Ms. Samet had spent seven years teaching literature at the military school, and the book is a collection of well-ordered thoughts about her education of the cadets in her class. At the same time, she shares the education she received from her students and peers.

Though the book’s title may have once been the description of an illness, Samet’s “Soldier’s Heart” is much more. The author shares the deepest (and darkest) thoughts of her cadets as well as her own, constantly wrapping it all within the literature of peace and war. Topics are broken down into chapters, and the expected discussions on courage and sacrifice are covered. While I initially expected this to be something on the order of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s books (“On Killing” and “On Combat”), early on I found Ms. Samet’s book to be much more personal. How do cadets come to terms with the expectations of the Army when contrasted with their beliefs?

Honor and obedience (“…a duty in military culture; war turns it into a sacred duty”) are both discussed at length. While Ms. Samet may lead us in one direction or another, she still allows plenty of room for readers to think their own thoughts and arrive at new conclusions, a hallmark of a successful teacher.

The author continually places us in the minds of her plebes. At the end of a lengthy discussion concerning one cadet, Kevin, Ms. Samet writes: “It is one of the great paradoxes of the Hemingway hero, Kevin found, that his cynicism is sustained by heroic fantasies. The appeal of such a sensibility to cadets believing themselves underappreciated by civilians who construe their military service as an uncomplicated desire ‘to kill people’ is understandably potent.”

The author skillfully uses the literature from her class to propel her cadets toward deeper thinking, and at the same time, I found myself being educated and realizing there are many authors I need to discover (and maybe a few it wouldn’t hurt to return to read a second time). No matter what you think about the men and women who choose to serve their country as soldiers, this book will open your eyes and give you a new perspective. Five stars.

[Patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

When this book came up as a suggestion for my book group, I was really unsure how I felt about it. West Point? The military? Who teaches literature to soldiers? I think my reaction proved to myself that I had to at least start this book.

Well, I now suggest that more of us need to read this book. These folks work hard. As a former English major, I stand in awe of what is expected of these women and men. I had good professors and they wanted a lot from us. West Point is asking much more of their students. The reading lists are phenomenal - I should start reading from these lists to catch myself up.

Samet must be a good teacher. It is obvious that she cares; she pays attention and she does not expect more from her students than she does from herself. Through her book she has given me an understanding about the military that I don't think I could have gotten anywhere else.

This book introduced me to a world I never cared about. That was very shortsighted on my part. Thanks, very much to NS who suggested we read this book. It enlarged my life.

[Ferris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay. I have to be honest. I am politically and socially liberal, and fairly anti-military. So I give myself some credit for choosing to read this book. However, I am also a bibliophile and was fascinated to learn what role literature might play at an institution like West Point. This book was extremely interesting. The choice of literature both classic and contemporary was intriguing. It was such a pleasure to read of the author's attempts to reinforce that one can be ambivalent and committed at the same time, that thought is a good thing to hold on to, even in the obedience mentality of the military. There were many interesting anecdotes about individual students and the role literature plays in their lives. The reader is also privy to the dilemmas facing a civilian instructor at a military educational institution. Perhaps one of my greatest pleasures in this book is the marvelous use of vocabulary by the author, who clearly loves using the myriad of words available to all of us in our language.

The only negative is that there were a couple of slower sections. But they are brief and certainly outnumbered by engaging and thought provoking writing by this fascinating author.

[Kim Miller-Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is written by an English professor at West Point who relates her experiences teaching literature to cadets, who, despite their youth and relative inexperience, will likely find themselves leading troops into battle halfway across the world soon after they graduate.

I bought this book for my husband in 2007 thinking that since he's a reader who attended the Air Force Academy, he would see himself in the stories of the cadets. However, the only thing he did with it was put it on the shelf. So, last weekend, I decided to read it myself. (A quick disclaimer: I served in the Army for 5 years as a mental health counselor and I now teach English Composition & Literature at two local community colleges so this book was a perfect fit for me in a lot of ways. I'll get to that in a minute.)

First, a warning: I'm not sure this book was packaged/marketed correctly. Based on the descriptions on the cover and inside flap, I bought it under the mistaken impression that it was a "mainstream" account of literary education at West Point i.e. an educator's perspective told in easily understood language and accessible style. It's not.

There are times when Samet's narrative voice is purposeful and clear. However, there are more times when she employs the meandering style of an academician's analytical ponderings that, although brilliant in depth and scope, initially appear to be divergent and convoluted. This might be off-putting for anyone expecting much lighter fare.

Having said that, it's a really, really good analysis. Samet uses the intersection of her own experiences and those of her cadets to illustrate some larger points about the true meaning of honor, duty, and courage.

Here's a list of some of the best parts of the book:
1)Her descriptions of cadet life at West Point.
2) Anecdotal stories of the cadets' reactions to a wide array of literary works. (She details their in-class analyses as well as the ways in which the literature continued to impact their military lives long after they left West Point.)
3)Explanations of the history of West Point teaching philosophies.
4)Samet's observations of representations in various works (ancient through present-day) of individual warrior psychology and military culture.
5)Samet's argument that a foundation in Liberal Arts Education is a necessity for success in any arena of professional life...even those in which it might appear as if the Arts are completely unrelated e.g. the military. (She clearly articulates the process by which liberal arts courses facilitate logical and emotional development.)
6)Samet's thorough analysis of gender role expectations in war literature and in the military culture.
7)Samet's brief, but interesting, exploration of the depiction of PTSD in literature.

An interest in any one of the above items makes the struggle completely worth the effort.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book. Seems unlikely but reading about an English professor teaching poetry and literature to West Point military cadets who are going off to war, taught me a lot about literature, its importance, the ambiguity and subtlety of the military mind. It is also an important work politically because of its take on the war and on the failure to establish clear rules of war in the War on Terror. The characters who feature in this book are people you would really want to know, which is not my first reaction: go visit West Point to meet deeply thoughtful people! But hey they are and so is the author. It is also well written and I read it almost at one sitting.

[BMR, LCSW · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a thought-provoking book, by an English professor at West Point.

My only complaint is that the author never shared if any of her former students were killed in action. I can't believe she taught for over a decade and never lost a former student. I mean, it's great if she didn't but...the odds are not that good.

Recommended for curious readers, and people who care what (and if) soldiers think.

[Roger Burk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Dr. Samet, I am a civilian professor at West Point, so much of the setting here was very familiar to me. I envy her close and continuing relationship with cadets, but maybe English literature provides more opportunities for personal connection than my statistics. This book is astoundingly rich, with new ideas and literary allusions on every page.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

What kind of reading do cadets do at West Point, the United States Military Academy.? That question is answered by Elizabeth Samet, an English professor at the Academy, Cadets go through a rigorous program of study and part of it is a humanistic reflection about the nature of military service, which always involves the possibility of death and dying, and the relationship between soldiers and he society they serve.

It’s a complex relationship that is explored through imaginative works of literature that both glorify war and condemn it. The goal is to have cadets, future soldiers, become individuals who have thought long and hard about their vocation. It goes well beond he notion of West Point as a kind of modern day Sparta that emphasizes only military training and discipline. Creativity and independence is emphasized, the idea being that soldiers who have thought both of just and patriotic wars, as well as he darker side of war - killing and destruction - make the best kind of soldiers.

Classes are small and are conducted along seminar lines with cadets expected to participate with their opinions. Imaginative literature in the form of both poetry and prose is read. Why poetry? Samet points out, “Aristotle suggested that the poet’s function is describe, not the thing that has happened, [as in history] but the kind of thing that might happen.” It is the study of language and how it is used. Shakespeare, especially his historyplays are studied, along a wide assortment of poetry, older and contemporary, that reveal worlds of contradiction and demand meaningful discussions.

For instance, Wilfred Owen’s well known World War I poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est” is both about patriotism and the horrible reality of gas warfare in trenches, and joins much of the disillusionment that emerged from that war. That’s in stark contrast to the heroic epics of Homer’s ILIAD and ODYSSEY, as well as Virgil’s AENEID which opens with the laudatory lines, “I sing of arms and of the man. . .” But every war expresses its own poetry, with moving pieces, both positive and negative, from the American Civil War.

Prose works are read as well. Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE is prominent; later novels like Hemingway’s FAREWELL TO ARMS, and Tim O’Brien’s grim novels about Viet Nam. Themes emerge, and are often expressed in chapter headings. They include the moral issues involved when atrocities occur (Abu Ghraib in the Gulf War of My Lai in Viet Nam being recent examples).Other chapter explore religion and war, the courage of soldiers, the anatomy of sacrifice, and an epilogue about the transient nature of a soldier’s life. A good list of recommended films and books is included.

Overall, I think it’s a fine book and gives a real understanding of what West Point expects of its graduates.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elizabeth Samet, a civilian literature professor at West Point, recounts, "This is a story about my intellectual and emotional connections to military culture and to certain people in it, but the real drama lies in the way the cadets I teach and the officers with whom I work negotiate the multiple contradictions of their private and professional world....the courage with which they challenge accepted truths; the nuanced way they read literature and culture; and the ingenious methods they have for resisting conformity in lives largely given over to rules and regulations." And who knew that the Military Academy of the United States graduates English majors? Samet states, "All cadets graduate from West Point with a bachelor of science degree, but they can major in anything from mechanical engineering to Arabic. Those who elect to study in our department's art, philosophy, and literature program are the ones I know best, but in the core courses I also get the opportunity to see a cross section of cadets at work." The cadets like humanity run the gamut of all types--from the right-wing Christian to the progressive ACLU card-carrier, and you should read Samet's chronicle for her list of recommended books and films for a liberal education as well as her insights into the connections between art and life.

[Alex T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point looked perfectly normal on the NPR website. From the article about it to the accompanying excerpt, I came to expect a book full of humorous stories about the odyssey of a civilian literature professor navigating the military. Instead, Professor Samet messes with your mind. At least, she messed with mine. Over the course of the book, Samet leads the reader, as she leads her students, to question our personal and societal ideas about the nature of courage, obedience, heroism, personal responsibility, and sacrifice. Through her literature classes (and through this book)she views current events through the lens of literature, poetry, and film as well as the memoirs of military leaders such as Grant and MacArthur. She also searches for and finds the relevance of literature, and--by extension--herself, in a society which she thought would view such a thing with disdain. I found myself confronting and meditating upon my own views of courage, sacrifice, and heroism, and not without some discomfort. Too early to tell whether this will be one of those books that will "change my life", but it certainly has caused a fair bit of introspection.

[Katrina Gonsalves · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I was reading other reviews it struck me that I did not see any comments from parents of West Point cadets or candidates. I read this book after hearing Samet interviewed on NPR and a desire to understand what my son will experience when he enters CBT (Cadet Basic Training) and West Point in three short weeks.

I was deeply moved, scared, and comforted. I should mention that I had to take a break from reading TWICE in the first 15 pages as my eyes welled with tears. What these young men and women sign up for is truly heroic. And if all the courses are as rigorous as Elizabeth’s they leave West Point with a ‘World Class Education’ they so readily tout.

I’m not one for long reviews so… whether it’s the closeness she has with her students, the cadets struggle to become a soldier and meld their old/new selves together, the closeness and support they receive (and you can feel this the moment you walk on base), as well as the trials they endure, this book exceeded my expectations and really opened my eyes to the real West Point.

I now think this book should be required reading for all West Point parents.

[Carol Bakker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A memoir about a (civilian) literature professor at West Point. Her job is to prepare cadets to be soldiers, to deal with the deep stuff of life and death, using classic (and modern) prose and poetry.

I had to push myself to finish this, but found morsels worthy of thought in every chapter. My to-read list expanded. I especially want to jump into Grant's memoirs (neglected on my shelf these last twenty years) after reading this.

The war has also placed me in a new relation to Homer's ambivalent epic, for I have awakened, after all, to find myself a woman like Penelope, who sits at home waiting for news of soldiers who have gone to war.

[Chad Manske · Rating 5 out of 5]

What does literature - particularly the literature of war - mean to a student who is likely to encounter its reality? What is the best way to stir uninhibited classroom discussions in a setting that is designed to train students to follow orders, respect authority, and survive grueling physical and mental experiences? This is the terrain Same traverses each semester, a challenge beautifully captured in Soldier's Heart. Interestingly, the book’s title has specific referential meaning, as described on page 14: “The condition we now call PTSD was first diagnosed as a malady of the heart, that figurative seat of our emotional life, by physicians treating otherwise healthy Civil War soldiers presenting symptoms that mimicked cardiovascular disease. Because medical practitioners had yet to identify the psychosomatic cause of this ill-ness, the soldiers were often said to be suffering from "disorderly action of the heart," "irritable heart," or, by World War I, "soldier's heart."” The book ends with an extensive list of recommended books and films, which is an excellent resource for readers to continue their learning education, considering Samet is an educator! Elizabeth D. Samet and her students learned to romanticize the army "from the stories of their fathers and from the movies." For Samet, it was the old World War lI movies she used to watch on TV, while her students grew up on Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. Unlike their teacher, however, these students, cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, have decided to turn make-believe into real life. West Point is a world away from Yale, where Samet attended graduate school and where nothing sufficiently prepared her for teaching literature to young men and women who were training to fight a war. Intimate and poignant, Soldier's Heart chronicles the various tensions inherent in that life as well as the ways in which war has transformed Samet's relationship to literature. Fighting in Iraq, Samet's former students share what books and movies mean to them-the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, or the films of James Cagney. Their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom. Samet arrived at West Point before September 11, 2001, and saw the academy change dramatically. In Soldier's Heart, she reads this transformation through her own experiences and those of her students. Forcefully examining what it means to be a civilian teaching literature at a military academy, Samet also considers the role of women in the army, the dangerous tides of religious and political zeal roiling the country, the uses of the call to patriotism, and the cult of sacrifice she believes is currently paralyzing national debate.

[Richard Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across Elizabeth Samet's book at a time when one of my son's was thinking about leaving college to join the military. I was hoping to find something that would inspire him to continue his studies. As it turned out, he made up his own mind to stay before I could get very far into the book. And, as is often the case with me, the book sat for another five or six months without me turning a single page. But when I did take a closer look, this time more interested for my own sake, I stuck with it.

What is it I like about the book? Literature and war and cadets coming of age and maturing in their thinking and analysis. The cadets are students willing to work at making sense of the world, not just to learn how to lead men and women in dangerous environments. But the world changed between the mid 1990s and the mid 2000s, changes prompted by 9/11 and the expansion of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Elizabeth Samet changed too as did the concerns of cadets. Much of the book is comprised of descriptive interaction between the author and the students she taught. Many lessons shared, some of them focused on text, some of them focused on the learning. Here is a story shared by the author about 'choosing the harder right.'

*******************
The Courage of Soldiers

Who knew you could learn so much from a hat? During my first year at West Point, I witnessed a scene that periodically returns to my thoughts. When class lets out, there is a mad press of sweaty cadets in the corridors of Thayer Hall making their way to the next class or to afternoon activities such as drill or team practice. Nothing, Errol Flynn had told me soon after my arrival, can prepare you for the steamy smell of plebes on a warm day in Thayer. He was right: that first blast of anxiety-soaked plebe on a humid late August day is like nothing else. One day, however, by the time I had emerged from my room after the last class of the afternoon, the halls were empty. The departing cadets’ scramble to collect their hat (or ‘cover,’ as they are called), backpacks, and jackets was over. Because everyone wears the same indistinguishable uniform, cadets scrawl their names on the labels, hang their garments in a peculiar way, or devise some other trick to identify their belongings. Inevitably, there is confusion: a jacket that doesn’t fit or a momentarily misplaced pack followed by a laughing exchange between parties. Walking down the hall in the wake of this tumult, you’ll sometimes see an unclaimed item hanging forlornly on the racks that line the walls.

As I stood in the doorway of the classroom on this particular afternoon, I saw two plebes scurrying frantically down the hall in my direction. After unsuccessfully searching the room in which they had just had class, they stopped in front of the lone hat remaining on the rack in the otherwise empty corridor. In their distress they didn’t even notice me standing across the hall. ‘Is it yours?’ one plebe, his own hat in hand, asked the other, who was, without any luck, examining it for some mark of ownership. ‘No,’ said the hatless one. ‘What should I do?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said his friend, and they stood staring helplessly at each other.

The gravity of this situation may not be immediately apparent, but for a soldier, going outside without the prescribed headgear is verboten. When we once witnessed a colonel walking the short distance from his car to a mailbox without a hat, Al, whom no one could accuse of being a martinet, shook his head in disgust. ‘Damn colonel ought to know better,’ he said. Al loves hats: he regards a Borsalino the way other people might gaze at a Raphael. ‘It takes balls to wear a hat,’ he likes to say with typically effective anatomical confusion. ‘Either you wear the hat, or the wears you.’ Uniform hats, however, are more than fashion statements. When Al momentarily misplaced his own beret in his office one day as he was getting ready to walk to class, he seriously contemplated he Kevlar helmet he had used during summer training that was still sitting on his bookshelf: ‘I’d sooner wear that Kevlar than walk to Thayer without a hat.’ If lieutenant colonels give so much thought to a missing hat, imagine the consternation of a plebe who finds himself in the same predicament.

The clock was ticking, and the two friends were undoubtedly going to be late for something, but they just stood there looking at the hat as if coaxing a reluctant oracle. Then I heard the telltale scuffing footsteps of an upperclassman, and a world-weary firstie came upon the pair and asked what the matter was. He listened to their problem and said without skipping a beat: ‘Just take the hat.’ ‘Sir?’ ‘You don’t have a hat, so just take that one.’ Then, shaking his head at the obvious infirmity of these tyros, he scuffed away, leaving the plebes to stare at each other once again. ‘Do you want to take it? I mean, he said it was okay,’ ventured the friend with some hesitation. But the hatless plebe replied decisively and fluently: ‘If I take this hat, then the guy who forgot it won’t have one. When he comes back to look for it, it won’t be here.’ The plebe now faced the daunting prospect of running a gauntlet of upperclassmen and officers who would first demand to know why he wasn’t wearing a hat and then ’flame’ him for daring to provide them with the requested explanation. In the short distance between Thayer Hall and the barracks, it wasn’t inconceivable that he would have been stopped a number of times by an assortment of eagle-eyed predators. There would be no excuses, and he knew it. Yet when he arrived at his beautiful conclusion, his misery seemed to fall away because he had discovered within himself a particular kind of courage: the courage to do the right thing.

The Cadet Prayer requests divine assistance in pursuing a number of laudable goals, among them ‘honest dealing’ and ‘clean thinking.’ If only that latter were a typo for ‘clear thinking,’ I would be a lot happier. As is, it reminds me of the message I once read on a church marquee: DUSTY BIBLES LEAD TO DIRTY LIVES.’ But the passage I hear cadets quote most often is this one: ‘Make us choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.’ To explain both their own behavior and that of a literary character, they will often invoke the language of the prayer. ‘Well, ma’am,’ one might say during a discussion of the Weird Sisters’ prophecy in Macbeth, ‘Banquo chose the harder right.’ And that hatless plebe whose name I never learned and whom I never saw again remains for me the definition of choosing the harder right.

Elizabeth D. Samet
SOLDIER’S HEART
P 185 - 187

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite conflicted in how to rate this book. One part memoir and three parts academic paper, I’m not sure who Samet intended her ideal audience to be. A great deal of background knowledge is required to sift through this book, and despite my knowledge of the military and strong background with literature, for better of worse, I found myself compiling a list of works to read, listen, and watch in addition to the frequent Google searches completed in order to understand Samet’s points. The chapter on women at Westpoint is lackluster as well as problematic. Still, I was generally compelled to keep reading. Samet makes interesting observations and connects literature with the military experience in unique ways, even if her arguments tend to be obfuscated by the verbosity and pretense of being in the bubble of academia too long. The irony here is that Samet claims to be able to better see the reality of the military and Westpoint through her experiences with literature as well as her connections to soldiers. Perhaps, but I’m not sold on that. In fairness to the author, I read this a decade a half after publication. I would be curious to see if her views have shifted over that time.

[Miroku Nemeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I began reading “Soldier’s Heart,” this book interested me as the son of a veteran of Vietnam who was the son of a veteran of World War II, as the son of a father who came back from his time as a medic being wounded by bullets and shrapnel to join Vietnam Veterans Against the War. It interested me as an English teacher and adjunct professor who had both taught students thinking of going into the military at the high school and combat veterans at the college. I have been persecuted at the high school for teaching honestly about war using a vast wealth of literature from Homer and Shakespeare to Crane and Twain, Remarque, Heller, O'Brien, and so many others, and have found nothing but brotherhood and respect from those I have taught at the college.

Samet’s work did and did not live up to my expectations. There was a bit too much description of and pride in her elite academic upbringing in the book that distances her as a narrator from your average reader and even more so from your average soldier. Her writing style is best when purely academic, though with the limitations of academic writing, while her narrative style is often convoluted and rarely engaging. I read several reviews of the book from readers prior to my own reading, and came to this book with high expectations, and was very let down by it on this level. Samet’s review of the literature of war, what I was really interested in, is mixed. It is often very subjective and repetitive, and often narrow and entirely Euro-centric in scope. But she does have some marvelous insight into the literature of war, and I will provide a couple of the passages that really struck me here:

“The machine of military culture works to turn each death, no matter the cause or circumstance, into an occasion for celebrating the warrior spirit. In the most thoughtful warriors, such deaths also occasion reflection about the nature of military service and the relationship between soldiers and the society they serve. When I read the ancient epics with cadets or talk them over with my colleagues, we often find less truth and power in the rousing battle cries of Agamemnon and his fellow bloody-minded enthusiasts than in the disillusion of Achilles, the humanity of Hector, or the ambivalence of Aeneas.” (25)

“As I read the Iliad with the plebes….the part I found most moving was Hector’s departure from his wife and son at the end of book six. In the years, since, its power has grown; I find myself returning to the Trojan hero’s valedictory to his family and his city. Hector is able to conjure with arresting clarity the vision of a postwar world in which he will have no part: he envisions with foreboding his fellow soldiers ‘tumble in the dust,’ his parents die, Troy itself ‘crushed by enemies.’ Heavier than all these griefs is the knowledge that his wife will become a Greek captive. To preserve her freedom in the face of all the prophecies that spell out Troy’s doom, Hector leaves the city behind with the knowledge that he is behaving nobly, in the only way that ‘the one man strong enough/to fight off’ his wife’s ‘day of slavery’ can. In saying goodbye to his son, Hector acknowledges simultaneously the full psychic cost of the warrior ethos and one of the driving forces behind it. Weary yet determined, he prays to Zeus that his son might one day carry home the bloody armor of a vanquished enemy—that he might, in other words, reprise, or even outdo, his father’s battlefield heroics.
In Hector’s wish for his son, I read the perdurability of war’s romance, but I also like anachronistically to see a prototype of the citizen-soldier. Unlike Achilles, Hector isn’t a killing machine, and his martial ambitions always seem to me bound up with the survival of the city and the culture he defends. The mythology of the citizen-soldier lies at the heart of the American military tradition. It was central to the political philosophy of West Point’s civilian founders, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who were both deeply mistrustful of soldiers and standing armies, and it had its fullest flowering in the World War II G.I.” (42-43)


“Most of the authors we studied had fairly clear ideas about how sympathy worked: the farther away the victim, the less sympathetic we become. Hume’s claim that we are touched more nearly by the scratching of our finger than by the deaths of unseen millions encapsulated the dynamic. In a similar formation, Adam Smith wrote: ‘If [a man] was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.’ This aspect of human nature was either something to be borne or something to transcend. Some authors were more optimistic than others. Burke offered one model in ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ (1790)” ‘to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle, the germ as it were, of public affections…the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.’” (218)



While this may seem harsh, I will have to say that her visions of the Middle East, etc. are terribly narrow and Orientalist, and this is a fatal flaw that goes to the essence of why her privileged and elite education have given her no way to fully communicate or perhaps understand the complexity, or perhaps the very simple, humanity of the peoples and regions that her students travel to kill people in. She is intelligent and educated, and seems politically very liberal and often thoughtful, but there is an inadequacy in this aspect of her writing that has been institutionally produced, and is need of amendment in American society. An academic from Yale, Harvard, and West Point represents nothing if not institutional America, and it is an institutional misinformed and both dangerous to others and to itself as a result.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I sought out this book because my son is a Plebe at West Point and Samet is his teacher this semester. I was hoping it would help me feel closer to him and better understand what he is experiencing at USMA and it didn't disappoint. I really enjoyed Samet's anecdotes, especially around what it is like being a civilian in a military world and her reflections on literature, war and the literature of war. Her portraits of the various cadets and her relationships with them are heartwarming as well.

This book was written in 2011 so there is quite a lot about the Iraq War, and I am intensely curious about her thoughts on the state of the world today and the reverberations at West Point. Clearly she loves her job as she has now been there about 30 years. I would love to read a follow up to this book and soak up all her latest insights.

[Amalia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elizabeth D. Samet conveys through only the most eloquent and persuasive prose the nuances, complexities, and most of all indisputable earnestness among the young cadets at West Point. This novel is a brilliant example of some of the best writing I have ever witnessed (no surprise there given that Samet attended both Yale AND Harvard, and not to mention my slight lack of qualifications for judging "good writing") and has won my heart with how it offers a fascinating insider-perspective on the outwardly cold and robotic West Point. I devoured Samet's language throughout this novel, intoxicated by her effortless storytelling and ability to speak with such witty intelligence. 5 stars through and through.

[kris Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful rumination

Really thoughtful rumination on teaching future soldiers. Makes you want to either run out and read every piece of literature she wrote of, or go back as a college kid and go to West Point. She describes the cadets and their challenges so compellingly. Her descriptions restore faith in the American military without glossing over the negatives and the contradictions of serving your country. The book also is a wonderful story of the power of literature and of a teacher who loves her students and her discipline.

[Paul Womack · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine read (published in 2007, even in 2020. Looking for resources to bolster my inadequate familiarity with war literature, the book does not disappoint. However, more crucial are the chapters and their themes and the literature and observations on that literature by students at the USMA. For me a very fine introduction and a book to which I shall return (to coin a phrase).

[Tiffany Manning · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gives many insights into what we put young men and women through when they go off to combat.
The book also is a wonderful story of the power of literature and of a teacher who loves her students and her discipline.

[Sharon Zink · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author tells of her experience as an English professor at West Point Military Academy. It is good writing and mostly interesting, but I do not see the significance of the book. I would hate to think the way this author thinks.

[Deedee]

Dewey 810.711

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Samet's book explores the human side of her English literature students. But her students are subject to unique pressures not common amongst college students as her students are cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York and will become the newest officers of the United States Army upon their graduation. Recounting her experiences meeting and teaching these cadets, Samet shows their real humanity and individuality as they are formed to join an organization thought to be focused on eliminating those values. At the same time, she shows how literature can be entirely relevant to their training and experiences by helping to prepare them for what they will face, both in terms of their chosen profession and their lives. As much as it is an interesting account of life in a different sort of academic setting, Samet's book goes to reverse the process of dehumanization that soldiers of the Army have undergone in society. By being set apart by their duties and roles, by being separated from the civilian world by entry into a professional, volunteer military, members of the military are often viewed as identical, monolithic, and inhuman. Samet shows this to be not so. Her view of those who will be the next generation of American military leaders shows their humanity and how important their humanity is to their roles as leaders and warriors.

[Theron · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was either NPR's Weekend Edition or All Things Considered that introduced me to Elizabeth Samet, literature professor at West Point. Either way, I kept her book, Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, on my reading list a good long time before picking it up.

Samet does what I think she needed to accomplish in here book, describe why teaching literature to future soldiers is so important. I thought it was a given, but Samet describes the thinking of soldiers and civilians that challenge that very idea. "BOOKS ARE WEAPONS" echoes throughout the pages. Not just like swords, but also body (and mind) armor.

I also could not resist a book about books. I created an unofficial bibliography for anyone interested.

[krista. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well-written and thoughtful/thought-provoking. In spite of the density of the book, I found myself wanting to know more about various facets of West Point, Army life, and specific events to which Samet referred.

More than that though, I feel like I am coming away from reading this book with a better vision of soldiers as people. It's painfully easy to look at people who do things we don't understand and to assume things. This seems to have been made even easier in recent years due to the extremely polarized nature of commentary on war and the military, especially in relation to the War on Terror. Samet's discussion of her students and their relationships/reactions to literature made me think a lot more than I expected, and it answered a lot of questions about why a person might enter that world.

Unrelated to how the book affected me personally, Samet did a remarkable job of relating her work. She clearly has a great understanding of the literature that she teaches, and she uses that knowledge to offer some very interesting insights into the world of West Point and the Army itself. I truly enjoyed reading this book.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subtitle explains the book: "Reading literature through peace and war at West Point," for Elizabeth Samet has been a (ery much) civilian English professor at the military academy since 1997. Her book is about what it's like to teach literature to young men and women embarked on a career as US Army officers, especially since the events ushered in by 9/11. It is a tremendous book, not least because of the stereotypes about the military that it critically examines and frequently demolishes. The purpose of literature is to transform readers as thinkers and decision makers, and the military academy's leadership and professors are amazingly open to what that transformation requires. Samet is not blind to the obstacles, for military life makes demands for obedience and conformity that are very real. Her depiction of the intellectual and emotional challenges that face those who intend to serve (and those already serving) is detailed, rich, and fair. It is, regardless of context, one of the very best books about teaching that I've read. My copy, unlike a lot of my books, is critically annotated every step of the way, and I envy Samet her students.

[Mark Luongo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I must admit I don't know if I got out of this book what I was expecting. Now that I've finished it I don't know what I was expecting. In it she discusses the "subculture" that is West Point from a civilian point of view. But by no means does she use that to criticize the military or current policies but instead focuses on the charge that she has been given. That is the education of future Army officers by using the experience of literature to allow them to think. I hope I explained that clearly enough. No "robots" for her. This book is what I call a "thinking read", you have to pay attention.
She is a fan of U.S. Grant and his memoirs as well as a film buff which she references throughout the book. I've gotten a couple of reading and film suggestions from her work.
A quote from the author:
"As I sustain the faith that I am equipping my students through the study of literature with the ability to read and interpret their world, one of the things I have begin to suspect is that there is no preparation - not in the Bible, not in the Aeneid, not in Henry James - wholly adequate to some of the experiences they may well endure."
She has that right.

[Marv · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good read. I wasn't that interested when I started to read this, but it quickly turned into an engrossing read. Samet is an English Professor at West Point. Her book explores the importance of literature to the cadets that are soon probably going to head off to Iraq. One of the interesting aspects of the book is that it covers a period of time before and after 9/11 so you get a unique look at how things changed after the terrorist attacks. It is divided into chapters that deal with the different roles and experiences that cadets go through. One deals with the role of women, one deals with when to obey or disobey orders and others deal with the depiction of death and war in literature. The book also shows how intellectual West Point is and has been. Most of the Cadets depicted defy the stereotypes that most people impose on the military and you get a good idea of the intelligence that most of the Cadets need in order to not only graduate, but to also excel as officers in the army. Overall a really interesting read.