In the New York Times

What an inspired piece of teaching with world literature! A West Point instructor uses the context of her world literature course to compare our current thirteen-year campaign in Afghanistan with Alexander the Great’s thirteen year campaign which traversed much of the same territory. As she watched her former students “shuttle back and forth to the war since it began,” she decided to have them read accounts of Alexander’s career by “Ferdowsi, Arrian, Plutarch, the 20th-century travel writer Freya Stark and others” to help them “contemplate the mind-set of a soldier on a 10-year deployment” rather than a 12-month rotation.