Teaching In The Times Of War: A Powerful Account Of How War Affected American Students

I was teaching the day the airplanes hit the World Trade Center. It was the second meeting of 바카라�The Communist Manifesto for Seminarians,바카라� a course for my fellow graduate students. By the time I got to class, both towers had collapsed. A few hours later, Building 7 came down as well. We dispensed with a planned discussion about what Marxists mean by 바카라�idealism바카라� and 바카라�materialism바카라� and talked instead about the meaning of this particular example of the 바카라�.바카라�

We already sensed that, with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the White House, the attacks would mean war. But like the rest of the world, we didn바카라�t yet have the faintest idea  that war would last. And 16 years on, we still don바카라�t know.

A few years later, I found myself in front of 40 undergraduates on the first day of the first ethics course I would ever teach. You know how sometimes you have no idea what you바카라�re going to say until the words are out of your mouth? That day, I opened my mouth and this came out: 바카라�I was so excited about this class that I couldn바카라�t sleep last night.바카라� Eighty horrified eyes stared back at me. 바카라�I guess it wasn바카라�t like that for you,바카라� I added, and felt the blush creep up my face. Most of them had the grace to laugh.

Thirteen years later, I still have trouble sleeping the night before a new semester begins. It바카라�s not exactly stage fright, but knowing that I바카라�ll only have a few chances to convince a new crop of students that they really do want to examine their deepest values -- the things they care most about -- and even talk about them in front of their peers.

In fact, most of them do care deeply and about important things, too, like how they should treat their friends, their parents, and their sexual and/or romantic partners. They care about their friends who drink and drug too much and appreciate the friends who get them home safe when they do the same. They care about economic inequality, especially when they바카라�re trying to find a place they can afford to rent in this city of soaring prices, San Francisco, or when contemplating the  most of them will be carrying for years, if not a lifetime, after they graduate.

Some of them regularly turn out to be -style economic libertarians. Almost invariably, more are reflexively anti-capitalist. More than half of them are young people of color. They and the majority of their white peers care deeply about racism. They don바카라�t think the police should shoot  and they tend to believe that people of color face institutional barriers that white people never even see. Slavery, they know, was a terrible idea, but many of them are fuzzy about when it started in this country and how it ended.

Quite a few of them are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Some are undocumented or  recipients, so not surprisingly they care about immigration laws and policies. Their fellow students would never turn them in to the authorities. They may not know exactly why, but they have the feeling it would be unethical.

Some of them are in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, or ROTC. Some are veterans. U.S. military adventures affect them directly. While the rest of the students do care about war and peace, most of their lives are touched more lightly by America바카라�s wars than were those of their peers a decade ago.

They care about so much, but there바카라�s a lot they .

Don바카라�t Know Much About History...

The first hint I got about the gaps in my students바카라� background knowledge came early on in my teaching career. In a homework assignment a student wrote that Aristotle had quoted Shakespeare. Another thought that when that Greek philosopher mentioned a theater, he was talking about going to the movies.

I wasn바카라�t surprised that those students knew little about ancient Athens; there바카라�s no reason to expect them to arrive at college versed in Greek philosophy. But something far more basic was missing: a sense of the sweep of what Americans call 바카라�western바카라� history -- a chronological grid on which to pin the key movements and events that shape today바카라�s world. I soon found myself putting a giant timeline on the blackboard on which the students would try to place the authors we were reading. Then we바카라�d fill it in with other world events.

Even the relatively short history of the United States occupies a strangely flattened state in many of their imaginations. In their minds, for instance, all of the country바카라�s wars -- especially those of the twentieth century -- seem to run together, making it hard to understand how one war can lead to another.

My pre-collegiate history education was not really much better than theirs, but it was somewhat different. I grew up in Washington, D.C., in the days when Congress ran the city directly, including defining the curriculum for elementary and secondary school students.  We were required to take three cracks at American history (in fifth, eighth, and twelfth grade). Repeatedly, we spent so much time on the 13 original colonies that, by the day school let out for the year, we had barely reached World War I. I never did find out what happened after that, not in school anyway. Nowadays, schools have speeded things up a bit and the war they never get to happened in Vietnam.

I바카라�m certainly not the first person to discover that, for new generations, foundational events in her own life -- the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the women바카라�s liberation movement, even the first Gulf War -- are, to the young, history almost as ancient as the Civil War. Why should they know about such things? They weren바카라�t even born yet.

But here바카라�s a surprising development -- surprising because this last decade and a half seems to have flown past so quickly. I바카라�m now encountering students who have no memory of an event that has shaped their lives, this country, and much of the world for the last 16 years: the 9/11 attacks.

The Early Years

The first undergraduates I taught were already in their teens on 9/11, which meant that those attacks formed a historic dividing point in their lives. For them, as for the coterie of men who would lead this country to the 바카라�바카라� (to use Vice President Dick Cheney바카라�s admonitory phrase), there was a 바카라�.바카라�  

After 9/11, they lived in a nation 바카라�at war.바카라� The United States was suddenly fighting an enemy that, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld  바카라�Meet the Press바카라� less than a month after the attacks, 바카라�is not just in Afghanistan. It is in 50 or 60 countries and,바카라� he added, 바카라�it simply has to be liquidated.바카라� Little did they -- or the rest of us -- know that the liquid this protean enemy most resembled was a blob of mercury, which multiplies into hundreds of separate droplets when you hit it.

Recently, former CIA director and retired general David Petraeus  to Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour that the war on terror바카라�s first battlefield, Afghanistan, has become the locus of a 바카라�generational struggle,바카라� one that more than a decade and a half later is not 바카라�going to be won in a few years.바카라�

I바카라�ve watched that generational struggle as it developed in the classroom.  My first students had friends and relations fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. One young woman바카라�s uncle, a man in his late forties, was a surgeon who had been 바카라�바카라� and sent to Iraq years after completing his active service. In fact, it turns out that everyone who joins the military signs on for eight years, whether they know it or not. Any of those years not spent on active duty or in the 바카라�drilling바카라� Reserves still leaves you in the 바카라�,바카라� as many were surprised to discover when the U.S. Army ran short of personnel to fight two simultaneous land wars.

A few students had partners fighting overseas and their worry was painful to observe. Soon enough, I had women students whose male partners were returning from those wars as changed -- and dangerous -- men. Several confided (either to me privately or to an entire class) that they바카라�d had to move out because they feared for their safety.

And soon one of our school바카라�s graduates, Jennifer Moreno, .

Every September, the Army would appear on campus. Arriving in gleaming Hummers, they바카라�d erect a portable climbing wall and pass out glossy recruitment literature, encouraging students to join ROTC. Once, I was stunned by the courage of four young women, who stood off to the side of the show holding up homemade antiwar signs. Then one fall, the recruiters didn바카라�t show up at all. I never knew whether it was because the wars had fallen out of favor with the board of my Jesuit university or because troop drawdowns had eased recruitment pressure. All I knew was that it probably wasn바카라�t thanks to those brave students with their hand-drawn signs.

In the early years, more than one ROTC member admitted to me (or our class) that he or she doubted the Bush administration바카라�s rationale for the war in Iraq. One young man from Guam explained that, having accepted a scholarship (바카라�my ticket off the island바카라�), he was duty-bound to fight in Iraq despite his doubts. 바카라�I know that in basic training, they try to take you apart as a person and then put you back together as a soldier,바카라� he told me. 바카라�I want you to know that I바카라�m not going to let that happen to me.바카라� I바카라�ve often wondered what did happen to him.

Here바카라�s another thing I remember from those early years.  To my surprise, many of my students supported torture -- less as an interrogation method than as punishment for truly heinous crimes (torture, that is, as righteous vengeance). Terrorists should be tortured, some argued, as payback for 9/11, but perhaps because their own childhoods were still so near in time and memory, a number of them thought that those most deserving of torture were not political terrorists, but child abusers.

Just about all of them were certain of one thing: the men who flew the planes on 9/11 were Iraqis.

When Johnny (and Janie) Come Marching Home Again...

Eventually, of course, war veterans began to appear in my classes. They were older and in many cases more mature than the other students in ways that didn바카라�t just reflect their age.  I often teach an ethics class in which students work with a community-based organization. One veteran chose to do this 바카라�service learning바카라� with , which provides services for vets. They바카라�d helped him when he first got out, and he wanted to return the favor. 바카라�If anyone tells you they came back whole from Iraq or Afghanistan,바카라� he assured me, 바카라�they바카라�re either lying or they just don바카라�t know yet.바카라�

He was right, I think. One thing I바카라�ve noticed over the years: like many survivors of war, those vets never volunteer to talk about what they바카라�ve seen. Nor do their fellow students show much curiosity about it, and I don바카라�t ask directly. But some, like the young man who바카라�d served five years as a sniper in Iraq and Afghanistan, are clearly in pain. He바카라�d suffered a broken back and brain trauma when an improvised explosive device blew up his Humvee. He was bitter about the war and his own role in it, certain that he바카라�d been lied to by his government. Since leaving the military he had learned a lot of history. Now, he sat in the last row of the classroom, back to the wall, one leg bouncing uncontrollably up and down. Usually he left early. The anxiety of being in a room with that many people, he explained to me, was more than he could endure.

Such veterans, however, are classroom oddities, rare exceptions to the general rule that the U.S. can fight an endless war on terror without pain, sacrifice, or even, in recent years, . These days, my students live in a country that has been at war almost since they were born, and yet, as is true with most of their fellow citizens, the fighting could be happening on Mars for all the impact it has on them. Most of them no longer know people directly affected. Their friends and family, of course, aren't among the tens of millions of Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, or Yemenis made refugees by those American wars and their consequences.

Most of them haven바카라�t yet realized that, if their government hadn바카라�t spent  and counting on those very wars, there might have been federal money available to relieve them of the school debt they will carry for decades.

Those Who Fail to Learn...

It바카라�s not an accident that my students arrive at college with little understanding of U.S. history or, for that matter, knowledge of how their government works. Nor is it their fault. Education is crucial to citizenship in a democracy and, for many years, those on the right in this country have done their best to defund and dismantle public education. Under President Trump we have a secretary of education who  of her belief that, like other public goods, education is best left in the tender hands of the market.

The other day I asked my 바카라�Ethics: War, Torture, and Terrorism바카라� class to name the countries where the United States is currently involved in some military action. They were able to come up with Iraq and Afghanistan. A veteran then added Djibouti, where U.S.  has a key base. 바카라�Syria?바카라� someone wondered. A ROTC member mentioned Yemen. No one even thought of Somalia or Libya. No one had heard of the West African country of , where Sergeant LaDavid Johnson died in an ambush set by an ISIS affiliate. (If asked, some might have remembered that when Donald Trump called Johnson's widow, he made news by struggling to remember her husband바카라�s name and  that Johnson had known 바카라�what he signed up for.바카라�)

Nor could they name any of the other countries, , affected in some fashion by their country바카라�s undeclared, never-ending 바카라�generational바카라� war on terror.

The good news is that they want to learn.

The bad news: nowadays, they tend to think that the men who flew those planes on 9/11 were from Iran.

The article first appeared on

(Rebecca Gordon, a , teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of . Her previous books include  and Letters from Nicaragua.)