I was a graduate student in the English
Department at Columbia during much of the Vietnam
War. I suppose I could say that Restoration Drama
kept me alive. Or alive and in this country. One
of my classmates was Ben Covington, who had
served three years in Vietnam, a Regular Army
Captain and a wartime Major. His ancestors had
been generals in every American war since the
Revolution (and on both sides in the Civil War),
and Ben was on a fast track to join them. He was
among a group of officers sent to universities to
earn doctorates and teach at West Point, the idea
being to reduce the civilian presence as much as
possible--good sense, from the military's point of view, given the times.
Ben was great, but he must have been the most
innocent person on campus. He claimed not to have
been aware that his men used drugs, but there was
no way he could have missed what was going on on
campus, where students and much of the faculty
spent a lot of their time in induced psychotic
states. More even than was apparent--I recently
was at dinner with a very distinguished scholar
who had been a prof at Columbia when I was
starting out and is now in his 80s. He had always
seemed thoroughly buttoned down. At dinner he regaled us with LSD stories.
Ben arrived in 1968, in the midst of the antiwar
riots that continued pretty much unabated for the
next two years. He had never questioned the war.
He took it all in, including the endless
challenges to his conservatism, with tolerance
and humor, and he learned. After his doctorate he
taught the Elizabethans at the Point for four
years (required service in payment for his degree) and left the military.
I'd love to know what became of him.
Mark
At 07:42 PM 9/30/2007, you wrote:
>Here is my comment on the article, from my weblog<http://www.sharpsand.net/>
>:
>
>That is what Elizabeth D. Samet appears to have written in her forthcoming
>book, excerpted
>here<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30WestPoint-t.html?ex=1348804800&en=1295af93deef8a15&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss>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."
>
>
>
>--
>Joseph Duemer
>Professor of Humanities
>Clarkson University
>[sharpsand.net]
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