The Visitor

At Boston College I teach a senior seminar called “Americans, Ugly and Beautiful,” and last week we had a visitor: Sean Morrow, an Army major still on active duty and getting a master’s degree in English; he was deployed twice in Iraq, one during the invasion and the other during the surge.

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The topic was counterinsurgency, and the readings included “Inside the Surge,” a first-person account written by Army Lt. Col. Jim Crider, which was published in June 2009 by the Center for a New American Security.

It was a good class—unlike most discussions of the Iraq war in academia, it was neither a barrage of blue-state invective, nor a firefight between cliché-spouting undergraduates. A couple of students admitted to having never met an active-duty soldier, much less an Iraq vet; one remarked that he would never consider serving in the military but was glad others did. But the students (and their professor) were riveted by Maj. Morrow’s experiences, which, needless to say, did not fit into any ideologically constructed box.

For example, Maj. Morrow recalled how, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the streets of Baghdad were full of both women and men throwing flowers and men (not women) kissing soldiers. “It was like the liberation of France,” he said, “and we were told we’d be leaving just as soon as we could tie up the loose ends.” But then, he added, “It got bad—quick.”

Upon his redeployment in 2007, Maj. Morrow was given command of a 70-square kilometer region in the Sunni Triangle. At first, counterinsurgency seemed too daunting, he said, “because it takes thinking in ways we’re not trained to think, and doing things we’re not trained to do.” But fortunately, his commanding officer gave him free rein to improvise as he saw fit.

Like Lt. Col. Crider wrote in his working paper, Maj. Morrow started his deployment by taking a census—not for the usual reason of allocating government resources, but because it gave him an excuse to meet and talk with every householder in the district. The benefits were many, from providing cover to Iraqis who chose to cooperate, to making contact (through female medical officers) with the women, many of whom were strongly motivated to rid their neighborhood of ideological terrorists.

One of my students, an art history major, asked Maj. Morrow what it was like to command soldiers. “I love it,” he replied. “It’s the main reason I’m still in the Army.” People love doing what they’re good at; and judging by a few of his anecdotes, Maj. Morrow is good at commanding soldiers, many of whom do not approach counterinsurgency with a positive attitude.

The hardest thing, he recalled, is convincing “18-year-olds with dead buddies” to reach out to local residents suspected of helping the insurgency. “I tried to explain that every war ends in a truce, and here the truce is between us and these guys.” By offering “a clean slate going forward” to local men not ideologically committed to the insurgency, Maj. Morrow’s unit gained invaluable intelligence and partners in economic development efforts ranging from carp farms to small water-filtration stations.

At the end of the class, I raised the issue of a culture gap between the military and civilian sides of American life. Clearly this gap no longer takes the form of anti-war protesters calling soldiers “baby killers,” as happened to a Marine of my acquaintance upon his return, badly wounded, from Vietnam.

But the gap is still there, as evidenced by Maj. Morrow’s comment that he was really enjoying Boston College, because it gave him the opportunity “to hear different perspectives and get away from the group-think.” My students felt the same way, but as veterans return to U.S. campuses under the new G.I. Bill, the danger is that they will try too hard to blend in. “We can always spot each other,” Maj. Morrow told me, “but we don’t make a point of announcing our presence.”

From a pedagogical perspective, I think veterans should announce their presence, and share their experiences with their fellow students. After all, when it comes to group-think, the military does not have a monopoly. And the result, to judge by what happened in my seminar last week, would be an increase in the number of “beautiful Americans.”