For a good long time now, years and lots of years, I've held that anyone who claims a liberal education should read at least some military history, and any college that awards a BA degree should require a course.
There are a lot of reasons for thinking so, among them the clear reality that making informed decisions about the conduct of warfare is a vital public responsibility, and also that, as William James suggested in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," in understanding human phenomena it is most instructive to examine their extremes.
War illuminates both the finest and the basest of human conduct - the most noble, selfless, heroic; the most cruel, vindictive, and cowardly. Two of the books now on the sidebar provide a wealth of examples: James D. Hornfischer's "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors" and "Flags of Our Fathers," by James Bradley and Ron Powers (now also a Clint Eastwood movie).
Neither one of them is pleasant reading. Both are excellent and instructive books.
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