Academia = Asset
A glimpse of humanity and courage in a Yale Jackson School class for undergrads.
I lecture at the Yale Jackson School for Global Affairs, having (at the age of fifty-eight) graduated Yale as a humanities undergrad in 2024. Before stumbling into academia, I founded a non-profit and served 25 years in the U.S. military. Twenty-two of those years were in the Special Operations Community, a career that ended at the business end of a Kalashnikov in a poppy field in Ghazni, Afghanistan.
My course, “The Impact of War on Its Willing and Unwilling Participants,” is intentionally curated to balance ROTC and conservative students with progressive-minded peers. We engage with difficult texts, host primary-source speakers (me included), and use the Yale Art Gallery to connect the people we study with art created around similar themes—revealing the human rodeo in real time.
The goal of this course is simple: to show students that everyone in war is human—even “volunteers” like me. We speak with refugees, veterans with significant and diverse combat experience, journalists who have lived inside war zones, and law-enforcement personnel who responded to terror firsthand, including the worst attack on U.S. soil in our history.
The most important work happens in discussion. We analyze current conflicts with citizens of those very nations sitting among us. We use our literary sources as an on-ramp to a different view of the current state of conflict in the world. The value of this is impossible to measure. The stories students share, the questions they ask, and what they carry forward would bring you to tears. I also lend students the body armor I wore on missions, letting them take it back to their dorms. Feeling its weight gives them a physical sense of the burden that comes with volunteering to risk one’s life for others. I was struck by how many progressive-minded students were eager to spend time with it.
Looking back on American failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, I see moments where a class like this might have influenced outcomes. Beyond the arrogance and hubris, it was clear that many civilians knew very little about the military or how it functioned. This is a serious problem. Watching that gap close in real time—before lives are in the breach—has been an unplanned gift. As a former enlisted service member, I can joke with ROTC students in ways that surprise their non-ROTC peers. That familiarity relaxes the room and quickly blends the different vernaculars that exist on campus.
This course has been as much a learning experience for me as it is for the students. When I was admitted to Yale in 2019, my greatest fear—aside from being exposed as an imposter—was meeting a student who viewed my past work as criminal. I care deeply for these students, all of them, and I want to meet them where they are, sharing what I’ve learned over 58 years, guided by the serious scholars who direct this place.
That fear became reality this semester. On the first day of class, a student from a region heavily impacted by American foreign-policy failures—some in which I enthusiastically participated—looked at me with barely contained anger. I had shot and killed young men who looked just like this student. After the second class, he emailed asking to meet.
We sat in a small garden near the classroom. He looked me in the eye and said, “I need you to know that I don’t see you the way most students here do.” I smiled and replied, “I imagine you see me less as a hero and more as a war criminal.” He nodded—and smiled back. We spoke for over two hours. I told him, honestly, that if I had grown up where he did, I would feel exactly the same way. That surprised him. For me, that moment is where the real work of academia happens. I’ve seen—and taken part in—the damage caused by ignorance and arrogance fueled by assumptions and fear disguised as hate. This particular type of moment is the opposite.
As someone who eagerly and enthusiastically took part in aggressive close combat, I’m not claiming any moral high ground. I enjoyed the violence; there’s no pedestal here. And for all my “action-man” experience, I’m not sure that, as a student watching my own community suffer, I would have had the courage to sit in a classroom taught by a human like me—someone who, from their perspective, would be the equivalent of an ISIS fighter in mine.
That student, and others like him, represent an opportunity not just to learn, but to change for the better. The killing we’ve done—and are continuing to do, yes, me included—created generations who will grow up believing the U.S. is only corrupt, violent, and willing to take what it wants by force. This classroom is where we step into that reality. We take all comers who genuinely want to improve the world. We discuss the things most of you are afraid of whispering in your place of work or at your lunch table.
In my former work, dishonesty about our mistakes could and did lead to death. Nationally, we have not been honest or acknowledged our policy mistakes; because of this, the odds of repeating those mistakes increase dramatically. This can create a sense that perhaps I am not as much a lover of the American idea as I would like you to believe. Here is where I challenge that bullshit. Regardless of our harsh look at the use or misuse of American power, we remember that there are few countries where a class like this could even exist—and the reason the class happens is because of guarantees earned through blood.
Education, done cleanly, is where the cycle of war, ignorance, and hate can be interrupted—maybe even broken. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve spent enough time around both violence and academia to believe it.
Aeschylus’s Oresteia, written and performed 2,400 years ago, marked a turning point in Western thought. The cycle of blood vengeance wasn’t ended, but it was interrupted. Alongside curing disease and caring for our planet, that interruption—that pause—is a big part of why education is a precious commodity worth protecting.
In closing, please take a second and reflect on this piece of writing from the final project of the student I’ve mentioned above, with his permission.
Think about what I represented for that young person before we sat and looked one another in the eye. Where else could this exchange have happened?
“although you’ve traveled so widely through the world I am from—far more than my own passport allows me—you have not seen its life. You haven’t seen it in daylight: when the shutters come up, the vendors call out prices, the smells of bakeries spill into the alleys, and the whole world of faith, routine, and obligation animates the city. And conversely, the people there have never seen you as anything other than an intruder, a crusader. So you were denied the hospitality that sits at the center of our culture, and you never received the warmth that is reserved for the neighbor, the guest, and most importantly, the family. In the same way I come as a guest to your class to learn about you, it would be meaningful to have you come as a guest here, to learn about us.”