XplanaZine

Machiavelli comes alive for military personnel deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, or otherwise
in harm’s way. Studying and discussing classics while taking online courses
reveals new relevancies, new inadequacies. It can be life or death. Are online
professors up to the challenge? This article represents a composite of experiences
over the last four years, after working with more than 200 deployed military
personnel.

It’s the end of
another searingly miserable day in Iraq. The day is not as hot as the dog days
of August and early September, where dehydration and sunstroke await anyone
foolish enough to decide to do PT in the ordnance-free zone around the perimeter
of the encampment. In theory, mid-day would be a good time to run laps — the
insurgents seem to like to mortar at night or early pre-dawn moments, when their
impromptu reveille is at its most unwelcome, while edgy troops still float around
somewhere in the netherworld of the hyper-dreams one has while in harm’s way.

Master Sergeant
Twombly leans over and reaches for a large Zip-lock bag holding a three-pack
of water resistant Sharpie pens, a small, 3 x 4-inch notebook, and a small canister
of scorpion powder, and, most importantly, a dog-eared and annotated copy of
Machiavelli’s classic, The Prince. Although there are other books bundled with
it– Thomas More’s Utopia, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Marinetti’s The Futurist
Manifesto, and excerpts from Plato’s Republic — only the Machiavelli text has
aroused enough interest to be so festooned with marginalia. Apparently, Machiavelli
still speaks to the readers in the 21st century.

In this case, the
reader, MSgt Twombly is a senior NCO in the Army and he is taking an online
class entitled “The Literature of Leadership. He, like others who are in
taking the course while deployed throughout Iraq, the Middle East, Afghanistan,
and other nameless “stans” feels the need to talk back and engage
in a dialogue. For him and others, Machiavelli’s 500-year-old ideas that are
still as fresh and new as though they were written yesterday.

Certainly the context
– a context of nerve-shattering, unpredictable urban guerrilla warfare — has
reanimated the course content of the Literature of Leadership. Course content
that seemed relevant last year, or even last month, sometimes seems much less
so. Sometimes the learning outcomes for leadership courses starts to seem irrelevant,
impractical, or even worse — dangerously ill-advised. How can the online instructor
(sometimes called facilitator) — safely ensconced in her comfortable living
room, connected through a high-speed internet service provider, possibly fully
grasp the how the mere fact of being in harm’s way makes words take on new meanings?

The instructor
can be anywhere and everywhere as she responds to e-mail, reads discussion board
postings, responds to chat. The student can be likewise any place, with the
primary point of divergence being the level of danger to their personal beings.
Their realities are night and day, and yet they are bound together by the same
driving, urgent need — to find texts that explain human behavior, to encounter “Rosetta Stone passages” that give meaning to the madness, to calm
the frenzy of the here and now in order to convince oneself one is building
a stable platform for the future. This life alternates between mind-numbing
monotony and sheer horror. It is not the life depicted by the comforting and
self-assured speeches of individuals one sees in a videoconference feed from
Camp Doha, Stuttgart, or Washington, D.C.

Although she is
not in harm’s way, the madness is not any less tangible for Dr. Hockney, the
instructor for the class, whose role is often referred to as internet facilitator.
While she is delighted to be able to teach at a distance and touch the lives
of individuals through her knowledge of the classics of political and utopian
thought, she is, nonetheless, aware that she is also a mere cog in the wheel
of someone else’s system.

MSgt Twombly digs
around in his pack in search of Desenex foot powder. His feet feel damp and
itchy, and he reflects on what he will most likely have to do this afternoon.
Yesterday, a group of guys had the job that absolutely one wants. There were
casualties in the unit, and it was necessary to collect their personal effects
to send them to their next of kin. That was a tough job, but it wasn’t the hardest
one. The worst was having to pack the body bags with ice for the trip home.
They say that one task is an instant guarantee of post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). People who have had to perform that task wake up with nightmares, and
seemingly innocuous smells — a turkey roasting for Thanksgiving, or hair scorching
in a blow drier in a hair salon — will trigger panic, nausea, even vomiting.

Last week, Dr.
Hockney — working in absolute isolation except for the electronic communications
she has with her students and her employers or colleagues — was faced with
an awkward dilemma.

One of her students
turned in a paper that was, technically speaking, plagiarism. After submitting
the student’s work to http://www.turnitin.com, a plagiarism detection software
program with database, she found it was a string of unattributed quotes, patchwork
quilted together and foisted upon her as though it were a paper with original
thoughts and ideas.

It was clear that
the student, a young officer attempting to earn a master’s degree, had poor
writing skills and absolutely inadequate preparation for academic writing. Being
deployed in Iraq did not help. Nor was the student helped by the fact that her
MOS required her to be constantly on the move.

The instructor
knew that she could discuss the plagiarism issue under its special topic in
a forum, but she knew it would not get at the heart of the issue. How could
she help her student now that she had identified “holes in the scaffolding”?
Was remediation really her job? She would do it because she cared about the
student, and she realized that working toward a degree was sometimes what gave
the student a sense of a future beyond the constant pressure to “do more
with less” — a philosophy now well into its fifth or sixth year, despite
the “war on terror” and increased demands for performance.

Dr. Hockney also
knew that she could send an e-mail or could “chat” with her department
supervisor about this, or, she can e-mail a peer. Neither prospect was very
appealing to her.

Now Dr. Hockney sits in a train in a northeastern state, laptop plugged in to the outlets available in Amtrak’s business class car. Everyone few minutes, a “balloon” pops up in the corner of her screen: “Wireless Connection Unavailable.” The clouds along the western sky are fiery pink, and the Hudson River, sometimes seeming to be directly under the train, is a solid sheet of snow-topped ice except somewhere against the far bank, where it appears that ice-chopping boats or fast-moving currents have cleared a path.

MSgt. Twombly is pulling the copy of Machiavelli from the Zip-lock bag. The shaker bottle of powder falls to the ground and he idly wonders if borax is the active ingredient. As he draws his finger across the smooth white plastic and the pale blue label, he remembers a trip on motorcycle across the Mojave Desert near Trona, California, where “20 Mule Team Brand” borax was processed from the dry lakebed borates. Although he didn’t think that the trip was much of anything at the time, he finds that the memory of it brings back a sharp stab of nostalgia.

The western-themed “saloon” bar where he drank a few beers seems strangely important to him now, although he can’t, for the life of him, imagine how or why. It was nothing more than a place where he drank Budweiser on tap and listened to an impossibly thin young blonde tell him about how she lost her baby to “crib death” the same week that her boyfriend was arrested for manufacturing “crank.”

Machiavelli wrote that it was better to be feared than to be loved. A prince should avoid being hated. He realized that no one could serve very long in Iraq without coming to hate someone, so it was better to deflect the hatred. It used to be helpful to focus the hatred on Iraqi leaders, namely Saddam Hussein and the entire 52-member cast of the deck of cards. That became more than pointless as return dates were delayed, deployments were extended, and stop-loss orders were put in place.

Four years ago — a lifetime ago — MSgt Twombly remembered arguing with a group of friends about the tragedies at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Isn’t it part of the American Dream to start your own community, and to practice your religion in the way that you’d like? In reviewing the reading list for the online course he is taking, he realizes that four years ago, he would have pored over every line, phrase, and concept in Plato, More, Marx, Campanella, Marinetti, and others.

Now, he finds himself feeling impatience with Plato’s idea that philosophers should rule the Republic, and scoffs with a certain cynicism at the idea that an island kingdom, a utopia, could possibly exist in a world of instant connectivity, and universal punditry.

He logs onto the discussion board, where there is a lively exchange of ideas and experiences, most relating the Machiavelli, others responding to the other readings for the class. Today’s preoccupation focuses on leadership dilemmas in war when mercenaries are in the mix. Machiavelli warns against mercenaries. No one will openly admit the ongoing and very important role of “private security” in all the world’s battle zones. “They’re only out for themselves. They make a lot of money and they can leave any time,” says one person.

Another student points out that mercenaries are corruptible, and draws connections between economic development theory, bribes, and the “shrinkage” and “delayed delivery” of vitally needed supplies and ammunition. “The underground economy is alive and well,” points out another person in the class. Although the course focuses on literature involving leadership models, individuals quickly find that the best way to thoroughly deal with the topic is to be as interdisciplinary as possible. The discussion incorporates insights from political science, sociology, psychology, history, and economics.

Nevertheless, extreme isolation somehow seems pure and safe. A sudden surge of anger causes Twombly to look at his watch and consider doing some P.T. Running now — at 2 pm — would mean certain heat stroke, and possible death. This is not an altogether unappealing prospect. At least it would assuage some of the baseline anxiety that just absolutely never goes away here in Iraq.

Almost as a reflex, Twombly picks up the copy of Machiavelli and rereads a few passages from Book XIV. The prince should insist that the leaders of war understand the enemy, the terrain, and that they engage in constant practice.

Last night, a new group arrived, some fresh from the accelerated basic training that recruits now received. Twombly knew precisely what this would mean — more body bags to fill with ice. Machiavelli’s exhortation to never do anything that would result in your people hating you comes to mind. He thinks of faces of the military decision-makers now familiar to him, thanks to television, and is filled with disgust. They have violated Machiavelli’s primary principle. They have made their followers hate them. From a strategic point of view, this is not good.

The world outside the train is now dark. A stunningly lit suspension bridge rises up outside her window, and the orange-yellow and green lights look like magical star-paths to a different dimension. Dr. Hockney thinks about the e-mail she received, and the paper that described the leadership dilemmas, team-building strategies, and problem-solving challenges faced after a unit had to pack ice into the body bags of buddies they had laughed and joked with only hours before.

For the first time, Dr. Hockney wonders if she should be doing this — if she should be teaching online to individuals who are in the middle of life and death situations. What if her ideas make people doubt themselves? What if they hesitate and hence are killed? She doubts her abilities and experiences self-doubt in ways she never felt before. She has been teaching online classes to deployed military in harm’s way since the late 1990s, but of course, the ante was upped post-911.

She had always thought of online classes as lifelines in an increasing chaotic world. Further, she loved the idea that perhaps they provided a vision of a better future, and could open doors. Now, she had to wonder. Were the courses simply ugly reminders that classrooms do not correlate with war zones. The lessons learned by studying philosophy, literature, and theory in a hothouse environment of peacetime and prosperity are simply not the same lessons one learns in a battle zone, even if the texts and the instructional strategies are exactly the same.

Her goal has always been to empower and enable individuals to make better lives for themselves. She realizes the inherent limitations in this, and she sometimes wonders if it is possible to suffer from vicarious PTSD. She reads about the suffering, and the images even permeate her dreams. But, Hockney realizes she does not have the same kind of community that her students have. Certainly, she participates in the college’s “virtual faculty lounge” or in “virtual professional development,” but the activities and discussions tend to be workmanlike and utilitarian. “How do I enter grades using the new system?” or “When do I drop someone for non-attendance?” The issue of plagiarism hit the closest to home — which was to say that it touched upon actual involvement with students, and yet reflected a dilemma almost certainly universal to all online faculty.

Bring them back alive. Somewhere along the way, she had seen that expressed as the primary mission of each unit in harm’s way. She hoped that when they came home, they’d have more analytical skills, creative problem-solving abilities, and subject matter knowledge, not to mention enhanced self-efficacy.

The train slows as it enters the train station. Individuals are moving around, gathering possessions. Conditioned by air travel, Hockney does not rise from her seat until the train has come to a complete stop. By that time, she is alone in the business class car. She looks outside the window onto the brightly lit platform and makes a conscious choice to put her feelings of solitude and isolation behind her, at least for now.