"I've been to a lot of funerals at Arlington [National Cemetery], and I have a lot of friends with fewer than four limbs."
The realities of war, perhaps driven home most starkly by that comment from former Marine Corps captain Nathaniel Fick, provided much of the context for one of the events of New Student Orientation: the appearance of three authors whose books were summer reading for incoming freshmen and transfer students.
Onstage at Memorial Auditorium for a panel discussion and then a Q&A with students were Fick, whose memoir is One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer; former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Geraldine Brooks, who wrote the novel March, set during the Civil War; and Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter, '76, author of The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama. Political science professor Scott Sagan, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, picked the books, in part to challenge students to engage in a reasoned debate about provocative and divisive ideas. Sagan served as moderator for the panel discussion.
The authors focused on delineating questions about the ethics and sacrifices of war, rather than advocating any particular viewpoint. In response, for instance, to a student's question about whether it was appropriate to celebrate the killing of Osama bin Laden, Carter offered only perspective, suggesting that many people's reactions reflected their appreciation for leaders who will take on life-and-death decisions—for "our government taking on the moral burden to do that."
Along the same thread of conversation, Brooks noted that the dramatic dilemmas of war also pose "a risk that military service becomes aggrandized over other kinds of service," be it teaching or any number of civilian roles. "There's more than one way to serve," she said, generating one of the repeated ovations accorded each author.
The Three Books program is in its eighth year and is sponsored by Undergraduate Advising and Research.
