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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]