Army Captain Research Articles

Twain's Admiration of Jews Conflicted; His Article of 100 Years Ago Seems Less Flattering Today

It's been exactly a hundred years since Mark Twain first revealed himself as an unmitigated admirer of Jewish people. A marvelous race, by long odds the most marvelous that the world has produced, I suppose. he wrote in Concerning the Jews, published in March of 1898 by Harper's magazine.How different after all was Twain from H.L. Mencken, who (after the posthumous publication of his diaries) was attacked as an anti-Semite? As literary critic Joseph Epstein has pointed out, Mencken talked about the way they talked about themselves: But H.L. Mencken was no anti-Semite. For that he would have had to be, and obviously was not, meshuga.Concerning the Jews was most probably conceived during the latter part of 1897, when Twain was on a lecture tour in Austria, happily rubbing elbows and ideas with Sigmund Freud and Theodore Herzl. The Dreyfus Affair was in full swing and, like Emile Zola, Twain was a staunch defender of the young French army captain falsely convicted of treason. Most likely he was influenced as well by his friend Herzl, whose embryonic ideas about Zionism were fueled by the blatant anti-Semitism festering all over Europe.

Joe T. Marshall, Jr., 1918–2015

Joe Marshall began his international career with his birth in Paris on February 15, 1918. His father was on General Pershing’s staff during the First World War. The family returned to the United States in 1919 and settled in California, where Joe attended the University of California (UC) at Berkeley. His diverse zoological career began with a survey of mammals and birds of Redwood Mountain, Tulare County, California (Marshall 1939, 1942). He traveled as a member of the UC Expedition to El Salvador, where he studied the behavior of California’s wintering forest birds (Marshall 1943). During World War II, Joe served as a captain and parasitologist in the Army Medical Corps assigned to Saipan to study and eradicate malarial mosquitos on the island, which had just been wrested from Japanese control. A Marine sergeant, Philip Krutch, charged with securing the island from Japanese snipers hiding in the caves that pocketed the coastal cliffs, ran into Joe hiking along the very same cliffs with a butterfly net, trying to capture Edible-nest Swiftlets that were nesting in the area. This led to a dressing-down of the Army captain by the Marine sergeant. (The incident was relived with great humor when, after the war, both men found themselves attending graduate school at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley.) This encounter underscores Joe’s total commitment to biology. War zone? Front line? Danger? Edible-nest Swiftlets nested in these caves, and he had never studied—probably never seen—this species (the source of the nest for bird’s nest soup), which might harbor the malarial parasite that the mosquitos were transmitting. After the war, Joe earned his Ph.D. and accepted a professorship at the University of Arizona. He studied birds and vegetation in the mountains of southeastern Arizona. That led to several publications and to his collaboration on The Birds of Arizona with Allan Phillips and Gale Monson. The book emphasized taxonomy, migration, and the interrelationship between birds and native vegetation. In 1964, the year the book was released, Joe accepted a job as medical biologist, later zoologist, at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Bangkok, Thailand. While there, he embarked on studies of Asian owls and the distribution of Asian birds in relation to vegetation, and plunged into an extensive study of the phylogeny of mice and rats based on DNA technology, a newly emerging evolutionary tool. His breadth of interests expanded yet again when he began a study of song in gibbons, then added a comparative study of sounds of owls and, later, nocturnal birds. He published his findings in scientific journals and produced recordings of night birds and a recording of all gibbon species. He returned to the United States in the late 1970s, to a position with the Biological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Although based at the Smithsonian, he used his age and his early studies to look at changes in bird populations in geographic areas he had studied as an undergraduate (Marshall 1988). With his retirement in 1986, his focus shifted to conservation (Lanning et al. 1990). An accomplished zoologist with broad interests, Joe published 47 papers on birds, 31 on mammals, and 1 on reptiles. He was well trained in traditional techniques of observation and taxonomy but also learned and used new techniques, including chromosomal analysis (beginning in 1970) and sonographic analysis of vocalizations (1977). Of course, he wrote—and wrote well—but his diverse interests were not limited to zoological taxa only. He was an accomplished watercolorist who illustrated a number of his publications, including cover art (Marshall and Marshall 1976). Joe was also a skilled musician and a devotee of Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard music. To recreate the tone of the instrument Bach knew, Joe built a replica of a 17thcentury Johannes Ruckers harpsichord. To create the beautiful floral decorations for his replica, he mixed egg tempera from scratch, using pigment and real eggs. One evening, his wife Elsie started painting beautiful flowers on the soundboard, but in the morning they came down to find the paint nibbled away by ants. This was in the tropics, in Bangkok. From then on he added a little arsenic to the formula. Other harpsichords followed, and Joe then set out to play his way through all of Bach’s keyboard music. His children recall that he played in a calm and stately manner on his authentic instruments, which had a distinctive and beautiful sound, without the brassiness of modern harpsichords.

The Effectiveness of Dispute Settlement Treaties Between Commonwealth Countries - India and Pakistan in the Contemporary Scenario: A Study and Insight from Captain Saurabh Kalia’s Case

The dispute resolutions between Commonwealth countries especially India and Pakistan has been rampantly been growing. Even when there are instruments namely treaties between the states that tries to put end, all hopes tend to be in vain. Captain Saurabh Kalia’s case, concerning the torture of an Indian army Captain and five sepoys by the Pakistan armed forces has been a highly controversial subject. It certainly has given rise to an interesting question of International Humanitarian law: Whether such matter can be taken to the International Court of Justice ? The question seems to have paramount significance under the contemporary international law. The paper sets out the facts of the incident by way of a detailed case study about the torture of prisoners of war and examines whether the submission made by the Government of India in the Supreme Court is standing in law. It analyses the jurisdiction of the ICJ to consider the case, in the light of the legal impediments being presented by the reservation made by India in the Declaration accepting the compulsory jurisdiction.

The Dreyfus Affair and the Rise of the French Public Intellectual

Alfred Dreyfus, a thirty-five-year-old French army captain, was arrested in October 1894, found guilty of high treason, drummed out of the military, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guiana. While Dreyfus was in exile, his brother and Bernard Lazare launched a vigorous campaign, to which Émile Zola and others famously added their support. It was this campaign that transformed the Dreyfus case into an affair: a scandal that transcends a purely legal matter of guilt versus innocence and becomes a dispute that is not or has not at a given time been entirely resolved. Characterized by a passionate polarization of le monde intellectuel, the Affair subsequently became one of those moments in French history — along with the Occupation and the Algerian War of Independence — to which historians are always returning. As Conner notes, Charles Péguy astutely stated several years after Dreyfus's rehabilitation: ‘the longer this affair has been over, the more evident it becomes that it will never be over’ (p. 24; Conner's translation). In his account of the complexities and the actions of the key players in the Dreyfus Affair, Conner therefore covers ground that has been tramped over many times before, as those familiar with the episode will realize. He shows how and why Dreyfus himself was almost forgotten, as traditionalists used the printed media to promote a vision of France underpinned by values of order, authority, nationalism, and exclusion, against their republican opponents defending a France built on truth, justice, reason, and human rights. Conner's contribution to the already vast bibliography of the Dreyfus Affair sets out to provide what the author calls ‘a critical synopsis of the Affair, not its definitive history or a biography of Dreyfus’ (p. 33), a synopsis that sheds light on the actions of its main protagonists and on the rise of the public intellectual. There is indeed an abundance of data here but sadly Conner too often loses sight of that valuable dictum that less is usually more. He writes in sentences which are overly long, and which often contain clumsy parentheses. He has a tendency to shoot off at tangents and to include too many morsels of detailed information; this means that he ultimately fails in his stated aim to provide an account ‘that is comprehensive in scope but not cramped by too much detail’ (p. 34). This is compounded by unnecessary repetition: we have, for example, three descriptions of the committed intellectual (pp. 44, 50, 120), expressed in almost identical terms. Conner is right to remind us that Dreyfus was neither the first nor the last victim of a state miscarriage of justice and that democrats should try to hold their governments to account, but some of the historical parallels he draws with the Dreyfus Affair need to be developed and not simply asserted. In conclusion, there are probably not enough new insights here for those already familiar with the subject and there is too much densely written material for those who are not.

The oaths at Woodchurch, 1643–1644: tensions in civil-war Wirral and its aftermath

Four years after the end of the civil war, three parishioners of Woodchurch in northern Wirral were accused of having sworn an oath of loyalty to the king and of joining the Royalist army during its occupation of the peninsula up to October 1644. Since all had subsequently served the State as sequestrators until at least the end of 1646 and been responsible for the collection and expenditure of income from confiscated Royalist lands, their inclusion in a list of persons disloyal to Parliament is unexpected. The accusations stemmed from a confrontation of 1643–1644 with the rector of their parish, who had forced them (two of them his churchwardens, and two later army captains) against their consciences to swear the oath of loyalty, an essential element of the Royalist recruiting procedure. Six other local figures faced the same or lesser charges at the same time, and conformed to a pattern in which unwarranted charges were levelled against parliamentarians elsewhere in Cheshire with a view to extorting add...

A 'quiet African episode' for the Serbian army in the Great War: The Band of the Cavalry Division and Dragutin F. Pokorni in North Africa (1916-1918)

In the context of this year's centenary of World War I, the focus of this text is the music activities of the Serbian army in North Africa (1916-1918), where they recuperated from their retreat across the mountains of Albania. This paper is a result of an extensive archival research of the National Library of Serbia's collections and periodicals published during the Great War in North Africa. The daily news bulletin Napred/En avant published during the war in Africa deserves special attention, along with the personal archives of conductor and Serbian army captain Dragutin F. Pokorni (1868-1956). The paper sheds light on the work of a Serbian military orchestra, officially called the Band of the Cavalry Division (BCD, in Serbian: Muzika Konjičke divizije) and their leader Pokorni, hitherto little known in Serbian musicology. More importantly, the paper critiques official Serbian historiography and its primary concern with glorifying the 'heroism' and sacrifice of Serbian soldiers, whilst keeping silent on the 'quiet African episodes' in the activities of the Serbian army from January 1916 to December 1918. This paper also highlights key points in the fruitful encounter between Serbian military musicians and the multi-layered cultures of the Maghreb and examines the importance of the BCD's promotion of Serbian culture overseas as a type of cultural diplomacy. By placing the activities of this Serbian military orchestra in the broader context of Serbian cultural diplomacy in the Great War, this paper offers an answer to the current debates in the humanities regarding new approaches to, and interpretations of, this year's global anniversary, mentioned above.

Empire and I: Reading the Travelogue of a Late Eighteenth-Century British Army Captain

Framed in a discussion of post-colonial approaches to the British Empire's influence on culture, a close reading of Captain Donald Campbell's late eighteenth-century travelogue contextualises the personal particularities in his assessments of Habsburg Europe, Ottoman West Asia and Mysorean/British South Asia. His is an imagination in which the bonds of ‘religion’ ameliorate the ‘otherness’ of continental Europeans, while his concept of ‘enlightenment’ learning is deployed to understand the Ottomans. Only in the case of South Asia is the very humanity of the ‘other’ denied. I argue that this landscape of otherness reflects the coincidence of the interests of his ‘self’ and the ‘Empire’, which overlap most thoroughly in South Asia. Campbell's travelogue is of value to post-colonial approaches, as it is a particularly poignant example of the manner in which the particularities of the ‘self’ contribute to the construction of broader cultural discourses permeated by ‘Empire’.

Impressions of the Indiana Global Health Research Conference: An Editor’s Account

As the editor for this supplement, I drove down from Milwaukee to the meeting in Turkey Run State Park, located west of Indianapolis, and participated in the small groups and conducted interviews with various participants. Interviewees were either nominated by the meeting organizers, were presenters at the meeting or were selected by happenstance during the process of attending the meeting. As editor, I also reviewed all the supplement articles. I am not personally involved in global health research and came to the meeting with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I fully understand the allure of “going far foreign and seeing new countries.” After residency, my initial 3-year tour of duty as an Army Captain was in Nuremburg, Germany. Later, while stationed at Walter Reed, I frequently served as “trip doctor” for congressional delegations, and whenever possible, tried to speak with local providers about their healthcare systems. I’ve published articles contrasting the American healthcare system with the German and Dutch systems, and have served as visiting Professor to the Otowa Clinic in Kyoto Japan on two different occasions. In these travels, I have seen a wide range of healthcare systems, from extremely high-functioning to extremely dysfunctional ones. The disparity in health and healthcare systems between resource-poor and resource-rich countries is striking; the need and opportunity to make a significant and lasting difference is real. The instinct to serve is strong in many physicians, myself included. On the other hand, a part of me is honestly isolationistic and even embarrassed about U.S. interventions in health internationally. How can American healthcare organizations justify trying to improve health care in other countries when there is no shortage of problems and disparities here in the United States? In advance of the meeting I was also concerned that, however wellintended, interference by western organizations in lowincome countries could have unintended consequences. In one of my own expeditions abroad, providers in Rwanda had complained that there was money for “sexy” diseases, such as HIV, but no money for other important problems such as diabetes and hypertension. They felt the care they provided and their healthcare system was being distorted by well-meaning international organizations. To be frank, then, I attended the meeting with some predispositions to contrarian notions, personal biases, and frank skepticism. Perhaps as a consequence, I challenged each person I interviewed with tough questions. An initial question asked of all interviewees regarded their personal motivation to be involved in global health. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was some reticence to speak of this, perhaps born of a reluctance to speak of “self.” In the end, however, all respondents observed that upon reflection, medicine is, at its essence, altruistic and should be based on commitment to service. They all reported being strongly motivated by a desire to “do good” and to serve one’s fellow human beings. They also echoed my feelings of feeling appalled at the extreme disparities in health care between resource-rich and resource-poor countries. Many spoke of prior experiences in the Peace Corps or in missionary work. Service to mankind was a universal motivator among my interviewees. “What really grabbed me with this idea was that in these incredibly underserved and impoverished populations, with the right kind of intervention you could really make a huge difference in the lives of larger groups of people. Something as simple as a literacy program for women and children actually changes lives.” Other motivations were a commitment to cross-cultural environments, health development as peacemaking, and recognition that some specific scientific resources (e.g. genomic diversity, certain endemic diseases) are present in LMIC (Low and Middle Income Country) environments. Another tough question was how they could justify working on global health issues when there were so many problems at home. “Before we started thinking about primary care in a global sense, we worked hard to provide Published online June 25, 2013 JGIM

Charles Anthony Higgins

Born in Worksop into a non-medical family (his father worked for the Yorkshire Penny Bank in Worksop and later in Huddersfield), Charles Anthony Higgins was able to study medicine at...

Tactical NAV: Innovation in the US Army

Increasingly, employees are innovating with their own consumer technologies (such as smartphones and tablets), rather than looking to their companies’ IT departments to lead technical innovation. This can give rise to tension between employees and IT departments, and this tension is particularly pronounced in the US military, where long systems development times run headlong into young, technology-savvy soldiers arriving in camp with smartphones, sophisticated applications, and high expectations. In this case study, this phenomenon plays out in the person of a US Army Captain who, using resources obtained via the Internet and while on a tour of duty in Afghanistan, develops and sells an inexpensive iPhone application – Tactical NAV – that provides soldiers with a sophisticated navigation tool.

Hunting Captain Henley: Finding Fascism in the Reflective Voice

This paper explores how a reflective analysis of the literary structure of one’s own life writing can often lead to an exceptional intellectual discovery. The paper focuses on a particular narrative technique that developed during a journalistic investigation into the whereabouts of an English Army Captain who had allegedly bullied my dad in the British Army. Examples are drawn from a range of literary theorists and from the author’s own prose and critical evaluation. It is argued that the occupation of one language by another can generate a form of linguistic hyper-energy and from it the birth of what is described as Scotland’s Fascist Voice. Scots dialect’s uneasy alliance with Standard English in turn highlights Caledonian Antisyzygy, a term first coined by Gregory Smith in Scottish Literature: Character and Influence to spotlight the zigzag of contradictions at the heart of Scottish writing. The overall aim of the paper is to reveal a strong interdependence between literary theory and life writing.The subtext concludes that in isolation each offers restricted forms of expression, yet when blended can exhibit an independent intelligence free from the shackles of both conventional autobiography and traditional academic enquiry.

Ethan Allen and Daniel Shays: Contrasting Models of Political Representation in the Early Republic

Ethan Allen and Daniel Shays:Contrasting Models of Political Representation in the Early Republic James M. Greene (bio) In the winter of 1786-87, two of early America's most famous folk heroes nearly crossed paths, as Ethan Allen, chief of the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont, met briefly with two associates of Daniel Shays, the purported leader of the protests in western Massachusetts that shook that state the previous autumn. Allen reported meeting with Luke Day and Eli Parsons shortly before their ill-fated January attack on the national arsenal at Springfield. During their meeting, Day and Parsons reportedly offered Ethan Allen command of the "revolutionary army" they were assembling.1 Allen undoubtedly appeared a kindred spirit to the disgruntled residents of western Massachusetts, having become famous for leading a frontier militia, the Green Mountain Boys, against the authority of both the colonial government of New York and the British Empire.2 The Massachusetts protesters likely imagined themselves as part of the same stream of local resistance as the residents of Vermont since both groups had used collective action to block the proceedings of a legal system they believed favored wealthy, metropolitan interests at the expense of rural communities.3 The protesters in western Massachusetts even adopted the same visual symbolism used by the Green Mountain Boys, with members of both groups placing a sprig of evergreen in their hatbands to show affiliation.4 Despite this apparent compatibility, however, Allen sought to distance himself from the Massachusetts uprising by refusing the offer of leadership and ordering Day and Parsons to leave Vermont. Allen then took the additional step of writing Governor James Bowdoin of Massachusetts to assure him the republic of Vermont would not give asylum to these rebels. In a Boston newspaper in March 1787, after the failed assault on Springfield and the subsequent rout of the insurgents by a small army led by former Continental Army general Benjamin Lincoln, Allen declared he had no further [End Page 125] contact with Shays or his adherents and that "he heartily despised both them and their cause" (Walton 380). While they may have shared similar goals and methods, there would be no collaboration between Ethan Allen and Daniel Shays. The politically savvy Allen likely realized a direct association with the insurgents in Massachusetts would only hamper his efforts to obtain recognition of Vermont's independence. While the threat of the Green Mountain Boys joining the fray in Massachusetts could be a means of pressing for inclusion in the national confederation, an actual collaboration would likely alienate the region from its neighbors. Thus, Allen chose to reject the offer from Day and Parsons, while also publicizing that this offer had been made. This attention to public perception highlights the contrast between Allen and Shays as leaders of popular uprisings: whereas Shays never sought to present himself as the head of a social movement, Allen consciously strove to be the spokesman for Vermont's independence. His talents for self-presentation have established Ethan Allen as a popular hero of the Revolutionary War, despite the fact that he spent much of the conflict either in British custody or at his home in Bennington. Daniel Shays, on the other hand, had served as a captain in the Continental Army and he repeatedly claimed the principles for which he fought the Massachusetts state government in 1786 were the same that had led him to fight the British ten years earlier. Yet Shays has become an iconic American hero only in hindsight, as during the 1780s his name was a watchword for anarchy among many of the early Republic's political elites.5 Why then was Ethan Allen successful in his own time at presenting Vermont's movement toward independence as part of the American Revolution, yet Daniel Shays failed in the effort to depict the claims of the Massachusetts backcountry as continuous with the goals of 1776? One source of this distinction must surely be Allen's prolific writings, especially his 1779 captivity narrative, which enabled him to define his public character in a way Shays never pursued. In much of his writing, Allen sought to position Vermont as a loyal and deserving member of...

The Force of Action: Legitimizing the Coup in Bamako, Mali

The coup d'état that occurred in Bamako in March 2012 brought a previously unknown army captain named Amadou Sanogo to power. This paper analyses Malian media reports to explore how Sanogo and his associates sought to legitimize their takeover with reference to local conceptions of heroism, power and destiny, and how Sanogo's public image resonated with time-honoured narratives about heroic figures in Malian culture. This case demonstrates that understanding religious worldviews is essential for understanding the workings of political power.

The Devil's Captain, Ernst Junger in Nazi Paris, 1941-1944

Retired professor Allan Mitchell has a long and distinguished career as a specialist of Franco-German relations, most recently with his impressively succinct and incisive Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940–1944, published in 2008 by Berghahn. The Devil’s Captain, Ernst Jünger in Nazi Paris, 1941–1944 is a spin-off from that, and offers his short biographical contribution to the study of the life of this German officer and writer. Barring a brief, and not very clearly explained, interlude where he was sent to fight on the Eastern Front, Jünger spent most of the years 1940–44 in Paris. The literary resultS of this are his Paris diaries, which are usually considered the high point of his career as a writer. Being an army captain might have given him a privileged position from which to comment on political and military events. Mitchell makes plain though that, as indeed is often the case, elements of these diaries have been sanitised with Jünger, for instance, playing down his own role in an execution.

North Korea and the Opinion of Fascism: A Case of Mistaken Identity

IntroductionRecently, an opinion has been in circulation that North Korea has something to do with the aggressive, imperialistic, and ultranationalist political doctrine and movement that grew out of the dislocations of the First World War and the Great Depression, manifesting in Italy in the 1920s, assuming the super-racist form of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s, and being implemented from above in Imperial Japan. Considering that fascism is imperialistic and that its extreme right-wing politics is violently anticommunist and antisocialist, the association of national state-socialist North Korea with fascism is frankly strange.The basic reasoning behind the association is that Korea was a colony from 1910 to 1945 and that thought in the 1930s and 1940s carried over into Soviet Army-liberated northern Korea from 1945 onwards. The argument continues that many Korean intellectuals had been co-opted in the colonial-fascist era and that these individuals were incorporated into the North Korean cultural apparatus (North Korea became an independent state in 1948), leading to a fascist-rooted state ideology that celebrates race.1 The claim is superficial and impressionistic.Other than the fact that its empirical ground is insufficient, the real problem with the opinion of fascism is that it fixates abstractly on ideology (a servant of politics) and neglects the political perspective and economic structure of postcolonial North Korea. In this regard, it is necessary to briefly consider some North Korean political history; revisit the writings of the late leader Kim Il Sung, whose authority is preeminent in North Korea; and consider how fascism in action has been described in fascism studies and studies. What the evidence reveals is that the North Korean system is incompatible with fascism.Struggle against Imperial JapanAnti-Japanism and anti-fascism are two policy lines that go hand in hand in North Korea. Both constitute the locus classicus of the political regime, the legitimacy of which derives from the armed of Kim Il Sung and the anti-Japanese guerrillas, who fought the Imperial military and police in Manchuria, with some forays into Korea, from about 1931 to 1941. As Kim Han Gil's official Modern History of Korea states, the anti-Japanese struggle was poised against the Japanese imperialists, the Asian ' shock-troop' of international fascism, and their imperialist colonial system.2North Korea identifies late Imperial Japan, along with Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, as a state and holds a view of fascism that recalls the Stalininst Comintern in the 1930s. This is not surprising. Before northern Korea was liberated by the Soviet Army in 1945, Kim Il Sung, who became the leader of choice during the three-year Soviet occupation, had been a member of the Mao-led Chinese Communist Party (CCP) when it was a Comintern affiliate, a division commander in the CCP Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, and received military training in the Soviet Union, where he retreated and became a Soviet Army captain after his guerrillas were defeated in 1941.The North Korean definition of fascism is summarizable as a form of that pursues aggressive as a of delivering itself from economic crisis. The term reactionary extremely conservative or right-wing in politics, while the term imperialism refers to a type of capitalism based on the domination of monopoly capital (or finance capital) and the international system of creditor states and debtor states (that is, colonies and semi-colonies). In the specific case of the fascist tyranny and colonial plunder of imperialism, fascism manifested the following characteristics:* anticommunism* aggressive war* intensified tyranny* police information system* militarization of the economy3Kim Han Gil repeats Kim Il Sung's words from the February 27, 1936, Nanhutou Meeting that fascism was an anti-proletarian political movement that appeared in many and that the fascists employed the means of sanguinary dictatorship and aggressive war to enslave not only the peoples of their own countries but also of all humanity and to fascistize the whole world. …

William Gorgas

In 1891, Carlos Finlay and Walter Reed made the landmark discovery that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes.1 Unfortunately, this discovery did not immediately lead to the eradication of the disease—not only because the virus was extremely widespread in tropical communities, but also because sanitary officials were reluctant to recognize the importance of mosquitoes as the disease vector. The task of putting this knowledge to effective use fell to a young US Army captain by the name of William C. Gorgas. Yellow fever had been a presence in Gorgas' life from early adulthood, when he had acquired immunity through a mild case of the disease.2 In 1898, soon after the end of the Spanish-American War, Gorgas was detailed to Havana, where yellow fever had been endemic for centuries. Gorgas directed a control strategy to identify and destroy mosquito breeding places, and after only a few months of a strict mosquito control program, yellow fever was eradicated from Havana. When Gorgas learned of the US government's decision to build the Panama Canal, he requested assignment to Panama. There he again tackled the eradication of yellow fever through mosquito control—despite vigorous opposition by US officials who believed yellow fever was caused by environmental filth, and who made efforts to discredit his work.3 President Theodore Roosevelt supported Gorgas′ efforts, and the Canal Zone was free of yellow fever by 1906, followed by eradication of malaria a few years later. Gorgas' enlightened leadership in public health did not go unrecognized. He was elected as the president of the American Medical Association in 1908, and in 1914 he was appointed by President Woodrow Wilson as the Surgeon General of the Army. Even so, public health measures that he promulgated during the First World War were often opposed by his superiors, who objected to their cost. After the First World War, Gorgas continued to agitate for more effective control of infectious diseases, consulting with a number of foreign governments. He was on his way to Africa in 1920 when, at the age of 66, he suffered a stroke. He was knighted by King George V on his deathbed in London, and lay in state in St. Paul's Cathedral before being returned to the US for burial.Figure: William Gorgas

Duhre, Kerrie

1962-2011Paediatric nurse, army captain and fundraiser

My Lai. Dir. and prod. by Barak Goodman. Ark Media for the American Experience, 2010. 80 mins. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/mylai/)

“To bring a case like this, given its potential magnitude, it had to be solid. It had to be very strong. It had to be believable. And it had to make believable an event which nobody would ever want to believe.” Thus reflects Aubrey Daniel III, who as a young army captain served as the prosecutor charged with making the case against Lt. William Calley. But as Barak Goodman's documentary suggests, the difficulty did not lie in persuading Americans that hundreds of Vietnamese peasants—women, children, old men—had been killed by soldiers of Charlie Company in Quang Ngai province on March 16, 1968. The evidence was hard to dispute. Rather, the problem lay in convincing Americans that this was indeed a massacre and Calley a murderer. Four decades later, consensus over the meaning of this atrocity remains lacking: a point evidenced both in and by Goodman's film. With no authorial commentary...

The Effectiveness of the Recent Army Captain Retention Program

The United States Army recently implemented a policy aimed at quelling a large-scale exodus of captains. This policy included the provision of a Menu of Incentives Program targeting officers in year groups 1999—2005. This study details the captain attrition problem, evaluates literature regarding retention options, analyzes the efficacy of the Army’s interventions by branch and by year group, and draws conclusions regarding future incentives. Methods used include chi-square and odds ratios analysis. Results reflect high acceptance rates for year groups 1999—2003; however, officers in these year groups may have remained in the service without any additional incentives because they were logically beyond the initial decision point. Findings suggest that seniority, skill, and adequate incentive pay are important considerations for future incentive programs.

Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914 (review)

2Oio Book Reviews543 civilian pay. With Brahmin privileges, they presided over enlisted ranks but left the daily operational duties to company sergeants. Officers, opined a Sixth Cavalry Regiment colonel, were not expected to work. Consequently, Adams insists, enlisted soldiers bore the burden. Adams's recurrent censure of the military's less-than-egalitarian state reflects an innocence of the demands of military life. Exasperation over mundane chores, routine training, and authority stretches from Macedonian hoplites to hometown national guards. Aggravation over seemingly omnipresent high-handed patrician officers even drew the wrath of WWII cartoonist Bill Mauldin who lampooned them in such drawings as his depiction of an Army captain standing atop a mountain peak overlooking a scenic valley, exclaiming, "Beautiful view. Is there one for die enlisted men?" Class and Race is a new theme within Frederick Jackson Turner's American West fugue. Adams seeks a "fuller understanding ... in the conquest of Native America," drawing him beyond Indian warfare by and into class tensions of the frontier army. By his own admission, he is not writing a conventional military history . Instead, America's frontier army is Adams's metaphor of America's Gilded Age, crossing the Mississippi to (apologies to Tennyson) mete and dole Victorian inequalities unto a savage frontier. Austin Community CollegeBob Cavendish Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 18JO-1914. ByKyIeG. Wilkison. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. Pp. 310. Map, tables, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781603440653, $40.00 cloth.) Kyle Wilkison's Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists chronicles the decline of "plain folk" culture in east and central Texas, with a particular focus on Hunt County from 1870 to 1914. Semi-subsistence farmers, both white and black, constitute the "plain folk" ofWilkison's study. Wilkison shows how, from 1870 to 1914, landownership went from a majority experience for Texas's plain folk to an experience of the relative few. This, in turn, "ended family and community independence as the majority way of life" (2). He argues, "Farmers' loss of independence in early twentieth-century Texas lay very near the root of their iron marriage to cotton and its accompanying socio-economic system. But cotton did not eradicate diversified subsistence production; landlords did" (11). For Wilkison the Socialist vote ofdie early twentieth century represents a last critique ofAmerican capitalism by a minority of plain folk seeking to hold onto a passing experience of equality based on a shared way of life, work, and opportunity for land ownership. His findings are based on an impressive number of manuscript collections contained in archives scattered across Texas, nearly fifty oral interviews ofdescendants ofTexas plain folk, government documents, and the relevant historiography of southern agrarian culture and protest movements. The secondary title of Wilkison's book, "Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 18701914 ," is slightly misleading. The book is not as much a political history of agrar- 544Southwestern Hhtorical QuarterlyApril ian protest movements as it is a cultural history of plain-folk communities and die transformation they underwent from majority landownership to farm tenancy. Wilkison addresses the Greenback and Populist movements only in summary. The Socialist Party in Texas, while examined in greater detail, is done so primarily from a cultural perspective. This should not be viewed as a weakness. The cultural approach allows Wilkison to analyze issues of race and religion with more depth than more politically oriented histories ofagrarian protest and farm tenancy. This is where Wilkison makes a noteworthy contribution to the historical literature on agrarian protest movements. Previous studies have noted how populists and socialists used religious rhetoric to gain adherents and the conflicts these movements experienced with church-based religions. Wilkison goes a step further by bringing to light how the issues raised by agrarian radicals, particularly that of landownership , caused rifts within the churches themselves. Wilkison's 2009 Fehrenbach Award winning book presents Texas plain folk in a struggle against modern market forces in an attempt to hold onto their traditional way of life. Landownership, semi-subsistence agriculture, and tight-knit rural communities served as the foundation for this traditional culture. According to Wilkison blacks and whites shared this common culture only to be separated "by the chasm created by the white majority's belief...