Readers — military commanders of the future
Bruce Fleming, author and professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, wrote a piece on military.com yesterday explaining why it’s important for some of the higher-ups in the U.S. military to be readers. The catalyst for Fleming’s defence of literature? A recent push to eliminate English and history from the list of Navy and Marine corps-approved subjects of study for Naval Academy graduate degrees.
Fleming goes on to examine Graham Greene’s “eerily prescient” novel, The Quiet American, a book that “heart-breakingly prefigured” American military experience — first in Vietnam, now in Iraq. He has the audacity to suggest that, “instead of less knowledge of how people have processed history and current events, we need more. And then we need the brass to listen when the Marine Captain with the MA in English talks about books like this.”
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Read Fleming’s story here
