Soldier's Heart

Elizabeth D. Samet, a civilian English professor, has taught literature at the United States Military Academy at West Point since 1997. In Soldier's Heart, she chronicles a decade of teaching future Army officers, tracing how the September 11 attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq transformed her understanding of what it means to teach literature to young people who may soon find themselves in combat.

Samet opens with a comic scene from October 2001, weeks after September 11, in which she guards the English Department's door during Plebe Parent Weekend, the annual visit by first-year cadets' parents, using a two-way radio with Shakespeare call signs. The episode reveals deeper currents: West Point has tightened security, and the parents filing past carry an anxiety that goes beyond their children's progress in composition. When Samet arrived in 1997, the Army was not at war. Graduating seniors could expect stateside assignments but could not count on combat. September 11 changed that calculus, forcing cadets to reckon with the real possibility of deployment and forcing Samet to reexamine her role. She introduces the book's central concept, "soldier's heart," the Civil War-era medical term for combat-related trauma, later known as shell shock and then post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She connects the phrase to the broader tension soldiers face between cultivating emotional resilience and preserving their humanity.

Samet traces her path to West Point back to graduate school at Yale, where she discovered Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs and found in the former general a companion who prized plain expression. When West Point advertised for an English professor in 1996, her curiosity led her to apply. She describes a long conversation with the department head, a Vietnam veteran she refers to as "the Colonel," whose ironic understatement and wide reading left a lasting impression. The Colonel became an important mentor, introducing Samet to military culture and entrusting her with a treasured first-edition book inscribed with the warning not to remove it from his desk. After watching Army beat Navy in football, she accepted the position.

Her early months proved disorienting. Military jargon, acronyms, and customs were bewildering, and in the classroom she encountered a distinctive plebe silence. Plebes, the first-year cadets who occupy the bottom of West Point's four-class hierarchy, had spent the summer memorizing rote "knowledge" and were unaccustomed to being asked for their opinions. Samet compares the experience to Dickens's Hard Times, with the roles reversed: She was the imaginative teacher trying to draw out students who craved factual certainty. She learned to appreciate that cadets had to shift between tactical training, parade-field drill, and critical literary analysis within the same day, navigating an institution where the physical and military programs offer reassuring clarity while the academic realm, especially the humanities, is where ambiguity holds dominion.

Teaching poetry becomes one of Samet's central preoccupations. She describes teaching Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" and discovering that plebes insist it matters whether the poet actually served in a bomber's turret, jealously guarding ownership of war experience. She introduces Adam, a 2005 graduate who wrote his thesis on Wilfred Owen and initially maintained that only soldiers had the authority to write about war but who later softened this view. She recounts the historical significance of books in wartime, particularly the distribution of more than 100 million Armed Services Editions, pocket-sized paperbacks sent to soldiers during World War II, arguing that books serve as weapons against boredom, loneliness, fear, and dogmatism.

Samet examines the experience of being a woman in a male-dominated institution. She surveys the turbulent history of women at West Point, where women were first admitted in 1976 and endured persistent hazing and abuse. She describes a lieutenant she calls Margaret, who characterizes her West Point experience as "agony and triumph always in the same breath" (101). As the war progresses, Samet finds herself cast in the most ancient woman's literary role: Like Penelope in the Odyssey, she sits at home waiting for news of soldiers gone to war.

The tension between obedience and independent judgment runs through the book. Samet discusses Ambrose Bierce's Civil War story "One Kind of Officer," in which a captain, rebuked for presuming to question his general, obeys so literally that he fires on his own troops. She introduces Andy, a senior who submitted a brilliant parody of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience instead of the assigned paper, accepting punishment for his intellectual rebellion. Andy later deployed to Iraq, where he read voraciously and corresponded with Samet through handwritten letters. She also introduces Max, a former Ranger and self-described rebel whose childhood love of movies shaped his identity. After combat with the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq, Max realized he wanted to become a filmmaker and left the Army for film school.

Samet explores the varieties of faith that sustain military service: professional, patriotic, and religious. She examines the messianic vocabulary of the War on Terror and the constitutional tensions created by organizations like the Officers' Christian Fellowship (OCF), whose stated goal of creating "a spiritually transformed military" she views as at odds with the principles soldiers swear to defend. She introduces Nick, a former student who lacked his classmates' zeal for vengeance after September 11 and asked whether his circumspection constituted disloyalty. Samet advised him that the officers she most admired were at once loyal and thoughtful.

The book distinguishes between physical bravery and moral courage. Samet recalls a formative scene: A hatless plebe refuses a senior's suggestion to take an unclaimed hat, reasoning that its owner would then be without one. This small act of integrity remains her definition of "choosing the harder right." She discusses Captain Ian Fishback, a West Point graduate who wrote to Senator John McCain about detainee abuse after his chain of command failed to act, and contrasts Fishback's moral courage with the case of Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Sassaman, a former West Point football star whose career was destroyed when he covered up an incident in which soldiers threw Iraqi civilians into the Tigris River.

Throughout the book, Samet corresponds with deployed former students. Neil e-mails from Mosul about rebuilding a city while devouring novels. Joey, a country boy who loves Willie Nelson and Pablo Neruda, deploys to Baghdad and later serves with the Old Guard, the Army's ceremonial unit at Arlington National Cemetery, confessing guilt about not sharing the risk of those still deployed. Samet reflects on the gap between civilians and soldiers, arguing that reducing all soldiers to abstract heroes or victims dehumanizes them. She recounts the deaths of two colleagues, Colonel Ted Westhusing, who died by suicide in Baghdad, and Major Bill Hecker, killed by an improvised explosive device in Iraq, as reminders of the war's irreducible human cost.

In a concluding section titled "Ave atque Vale," Latin for "hail and farewell," Samet reflects on the military culture of constant arrivals and departures. She closes with a quiet scene from October 2005: riding the subway with four cadets after a museum visit, parting at Grand Central Terminal, finding them "very young and very courageous indeed" (253). An afterword follows Samet to Alaska, where she visits former students stationed at Fort Wainwright and receives dispatches from Adam, now flying combat missions in Afghanistan and discovering in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage a description of a soldier's loss of manual dexterity that mirrors his own experience on his first mission.