Dialogues on the Experience of War: Using History and Student-Led Discussion Groups to Explore the Nature of Military Service

In particular, the study of history--its scope, reliance on analytical narrative, and methodology of tracing change and continuity over time--provides for an exchange of meaningful narratives. As historians Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier argue, "All cultures, all peoples, tell stories about themselves, and it is these stories that help provide meanings that make a culture. In its most basic sense, this is what history is: the stories we tell about our prior selves." This insight provided the basis for a unique service-related, upper-level history seminar that the author and a colleague, Dr. Carolyn Vacca, offered in the spring semester of 2018 for the veteran and civilian students at a liberal arts college, St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York. This article discusses the course "Dialogues on the Experience of War," which was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) special project, the purpose of which is to foster "the study and discussion of important humanities sources about war, in the belief that these sources can help U.S. military veterans and others think more deeply about the issues raised by war and military service." The NEH required that the grant recipients compare military service in at least one war prior to World War II with at least one in a subsequent conflict, and then hold dialogues with veterans from outside the institutions on the nature of military service, using those conflicts as the basis of the comparison. In the dialogue, the author used World War I (1914-1918) and the counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq (2001-2015) because, through these conflicts, students could compare the modern industrialized warfare of the last century with arguably the first postmodern conflict in the twenty-first century.