by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n I\u00a0confess this is the first time in my life I will break the old Hellenic rule: ton tethnv\u00eakota m\u00ea kakologein<\/em>(speak no ill of the dead). That Gore Vidal was a cruel person is no excuse for not refraining from criticism after his recent death, but here I sin nonetheless.<\/p>\n I could never finish any of Gore Vidal\u2019s fiction, even his best,\u00a0Julian<\/em><\/a>\u00a0[1] \u2014 although I grant that he was ironic, at times shocking, and could be a valuable corrective to unmerited reputations. But Robert Graves (even at his worst with\u00a0Count Belisarius<\/a><\/em>\u00a0[2]) and Peter Green were probably superior historical novelists. To compare similar contrarian essayists,\u00a0the late Christopher Hitchens<\/a>\u00a0[3] was a better writer. He was more widely informed and more honest about the public intellectual\u2019s propensity for caricaturing the very ribbons and medals \u2014 and cash \u2014 that he so covets.<\/p>\n Many\u00a0praised Vidal\u2019s essays<\/a>\u00a0[4]. Some were insightful, but more were self-indulgent, full of pathetic aristocratic references, and tinged with anti-Semitism and passive-aggressive gossip about those with better bloodlines and more money. Among the latter, Vidal eagerly sought opportunities to play the court jester. Somehow all of that was central, rather than incidental, to his arguments.<\/p>\n For all his claims of erudition, Vidal suffered the wages of the public autodidact. I noticed he quoted Latinad nauseam<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 and nearly always with his nouns and adjectives not just in the wrong cases (especially the confusion of the accusative and ablative in preposition phrases), but predictably in the fashion of those who like to copy down Latin phrases but cannot read a complete Latin sentence. By his sixties, Vidal had degenerated\u00a0into a conspiracy theorist<\/a>\u00a0[5], and his embarrassing late-life\u00a0infatuation with Timothy McVeigh<\/a>[6] caught the eye of the goddess Nemesis.<\/p>\n Vidal said he was nauseated by American imperialism and gloated over our decline, but his real pique was that the mannered East Coast snobbishness that he loved to shock had given way to a socially mobile, no-holds-barred popular culture that did not so much ignore his world of blue-blood repartee, but had no clue that it had ever existed. He liked being hated; he hated being irrelevant.<\/p>\n Otherwise, it is hard to find any commonality in Vidal\u2019s corpus of work other than a certain disdain for what he would term the \u201cgrasping\u201d:\u00a0the supposedly wannabe Jewish intellectual<\/a>\u00a0[7], the upper-middle class suburbanite who sends his kids to State U, or the American can-doism that sought to \u201cimprove\u201d itself through intellectual and artistic awareness \u2014 about which brings me to my sole Gore Vidal story.<\/p>\n I\u00a0met him once. Or rather my family did. In the early 1960s, my father, William F. Hanson, a former teacher, farmer, and then administrator at Reedley Junior College, proposed to the local JC school board \u201ca lecture series.\u201d The Central Valley farming community was innately conservative. But nonetheless, in the classically liberal spirit of those pre-Vietnam times, the farmers on the board not only funded my dad\u2019s proposed lecture series, but encouraged him to invite controversial, and often liberal, voices \u2014 over the objection of the careerist president of the college at that time.<\/p>\n There was only a small ramshackle college motel in Reedley (population around 6,000 then). Consequently, often my father asked the speakers whether they wished instead to stay at our\u00a0Selma<\/a>\u00a0[8] farmhouse, 16 miles away, on the night before the lecture. A lot did.<\/p>\n So it followed that, from about age 9 to 15 (e.g., 1962-1968), I listened to every word, at dinner and the next morning\u2019s breakfast, from the likes of Ansel Adams (I remember a short, bearded bald man in cowboy hat who railed all evening against James Watt), Pearl Buck (two strange aides who would not let her out of their sight), Louis Leakey (suffering from terrible dental pain and wearing a blue jump suit around the house), Bernard Lovell (stared out about two feet over our heads when speaking), Rod Serling (refused to answer our constant questions about the\u00a0Twilight Zone<\/em>, and instead went on a nonstop invective against Richard Nixon), Mark Van Doren (gracious, polite, and a beautiful speaker of the English language), and about 30 or so others in rural Selma.<\/p>\n My father ran the series himself. He did so as if he were back in the Army Air Force: systematically with checklists, and with minute attention to every detail of the visit. On a Thursday night, he would drive to the Fresno airport, pick up the speaker in his 1959 ladybug Volvo clunker (we had to buy all Swedish: Electrolux, hardtack crackers, etc.) \u2014 full of lecture posters, microphone wires, and box speakers \u2014 and drive them down to Selma, where my mother had dinner and one of our bedrooms ready for the celebrity guest.<\/p>\n At 6 a.m. the next morning, my father rushed over to Reedley, where he had students waiting to help him set up the gym with chairs, arrange the PA system, and put last-minute posters around town. Dad was a one-man production company and used 100% of his budget for the speakers\u2019 honoraria \u2014 meals, transportation, and lodging all provided by himself, without charge to the district.<\/p>\n My mother (who was a Stanford law graduate and working as an attorney at the new 5th District Appellate Court) drew up the contracts, legal papers, etc., for my dad, again with no charge to the college. At about noon, she drove down in her 1955 Dodge station wagon from Fresno, picked up the guest at the house (my siblings and I usually got to stay home from school that morning to talk to him\/her in the 4-hour interval), and chauffeured the guest over for the early-evening event. We joined my dad up in the bleachers after school. After all that work, Bill was never allowed to introduce the speaker: the college president always broke his promise and, at the last moment, hijacked the occasion to give a five-minute harangue about his supposedly brilliant effort to \u201cbring culture to Reedley.\u201d<\/p>\n Remember, this was right before the era of the blockbuster advance or lucrative film deal. For a bit longer, American and British public figures would often tour the country, in yeomen fashion, doing 30 back-to-back talks per month. I remember that my father always preferred to host only 3-4 talks per season, rather than the suggested 6-7, in order to pay a top-dollar $1,000 fee, an astronomical sum in those days. He figured that with such financial clout he could lure a big name to detour to the out-of-the-way Reedley, between his scheduled lectures in San Francisco and Los Angeles. And he was often right.<\/p>\n Among those guests in 1964 was Gore Vidal, who was not yet 40. I was about eleven and remember him as a stylishly dressed non-stop hair-toucher. He was also vain and condescending \u2014 and a big hit at his lecture with the conservative rural crowd. In those days he acted what was known as \u201cwitty.\u201d I recall asking my dad whether he was \u201cEnglish,\u201d given that his nose was angled upward and his accent did not sound American (and that he did not seem to like the US). My dad, in the Swedish fashion of honoring work for work\u2019s sake, answered that I should respect any man who could crisscross the country, giving 30 lectures in 30 days.<\/p>\n Vidal certainly had an instinct for saying outrageous things with such erudite authority that we yokels found him fascinating rather than repulsive. As I remember (it has been 48 years since that evening), Vidal spoke for about 30 minutes, but then he wowed the crowd to a standing ovation in the question-and-answer period (his forte), as he advocated the legalization of drugs and prostitution and went on rants about \u201csmall town\u201d values.<\/p>\n The night before the lecture (in an unusual fashion for this lecture) we had driven with Vidal three miles into Selma to my aunt\u2019s house (she taught English at Reedley College) for dinner. After the desert, he \u201cshocked\u201d us by declaring that masturbation was the sex act of choice, and then referred nonchalantly to his male friends. I noted one other thing about the evening. Vidal kept trying to namedrop literary tidbits; but my aunt, the JC English teacher, was of the old school (English literature BA, MA Stanford, where she had mastered the canon of Anglo-American classics) and had memorized verbatim many of Shakespeare\u2019s plays and much of Chaucer and could quote by memory pages of Milton.<\/p>\n Each time Vidal would say something like \u201cI think it was so-and-so who once said of so-and-so,\u201d my aunt would smile and say something polite like \u201cyes, it was\u201d or \u201cperhaps it was not.\u201d By the end of dinner, he grew more and more sullen with us rubes who were not playing our unenlightened parts. I remember that my mother, the more pragmatic lawyer, sister of the JC teacher, and worshiper of my dad\u2019s efforts, scolded her afterwards with something like \u201cLucy, he could have gotten mad and given a poor performance.\u201d Sometime in the evening, before slipping away, Vidal showed one flash of sincerity, and remarked to my mother, \u201cDo you mean to say that your old father mortgaged his farm to send his girls to Stanford? Hmmm.\u201d He also said that he had preferred going to war to going to college. (That got my dad\u2019s attention, who had done both, and went over Japan 40 times on bombing runs.)<\/p>\n A\u00a0far better man \u2014 in both the ethical and literary sense \u2014 died this last week, Sir. John Keegan.\u00a0The Face of Battle<\/a><\/em>\u00a0[9] is the most beautifully written and imaginative military history of the last 50 years. For a period in the 1980s and 1990s, about every two years a new military history followed from Keegan \u2014\u00a0Six Armies in Normandy<\/a><\/em>\u00a0[10],\u00a0The Price of Admiralty<\/a><\/em>\u00a0[11],\u00a0The Mask of Command<\/a><\/em>\u00a0[12],\u00a0A History of Warfare<\/a><\/em>[13], etc., as well as general histories of World War I and World War II, and dozens of other titles too numerous for instant recall.<\/p>\n It is true that some of these books were written quickly, but they were written with engaging prose, were full of ideas, and were usually right in their main assessments. Keegan was a British public figure in the best sense of the word, writing newspaper columns, editing volumes, offering pocket biographies, at service to a larger society he loved. As a classics graduate student, who preferred sneaking around military history to the required fare of the manuscript tradition of Aeschylus\u2019s\u00a0Suppliants<\/em>, non-literary Hellenistic Papyri, and moods and tenses in Xenophon\u2019s\u00a0Hellenica<\/em>, I came across Keegan\u2019s name in the late 1970s in a number of his original, now-obscure academic studies of the Waffen SS and German generals on the Russian front \u2014 before the breakthrough of\u00a0The Face of Battle<\/em>.<\/p>\n He was a master of the personal voice, but in such a way that was never chatty or self-indulgent. It never seemed to bother him that his unapologetic pro-Americanism, support for the idea of the Vietnam and Iraqi wars, and general British conservatism might imperil his literary career \u2014 perhaps because he judged rightly that his historical acumen, innate humanity, fairness toward historical figures, and above-the-fray temperament made him exempt from ideological vendettas. Keegan\u2019s success, fame, and productivity at times earned scorn from academic historians who could spot occasional errors of fact, but usually their nitpicking was not so much over matters of substance, and so their criticism often, in boomerang style, becomes self-reflective.<\/p>\n Here I confess a bias toward Keegan, because I knew him somewhat and owed him much. To know him was to like him. In 1983 a small Italian academic press published my doctoral thesis\u00a0Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece<\/a><\/em>\u00a0[14] (in elegant but cumbersome folios with the pages uncut) \u2014 to zero readership. By that time I had finished graduate school and abandoned a stillborn academic career. I liked farming full-time and had no plans to reenter academia or write again. But when the publisher wrote from Pisa and said I could send 10 free copies to journals, I instead sort of randomly picked the names of ten well-known military historians.<\/p>\n None ever wrote back \u2014 except one John Keegan, at the pinnacle of his post-Face of Battle<\/em>\u00a0success. A postcard in elegant ink arrived to the farm, with something like \u201cDear Dr. Hanson. Accept my gratitude for the publisher\u2019s copy of your engaging thesis. Are there plans for more of the same?\u201d<\/p>\n In those dark days (raisins had just crashed from $1400 to $400 a ton, and we were trying to figure out how to repay a $150,000 crop loan shortfall accruing at 15% interest), that brief note seemed to make all the difference in the world. At night after tractor driving, I suddenly started to write what would become\u00a0The Western Way of War<\/a><\/em>\u00a0[15], coming in about 6 p.m. from hours on the tractor and littering the floor with Greek texts. In my newfound confidence (remember, authors, what a single act of kindness can do for others), I began applying for jobs at local JCs and California State University, Fresno.<\/p>\n The next year I was hired at nearby Fresno State as a part-time Latin teacher (one class, $375 a month), which was a godsend, after peaches and plums hit $4 a lug and our income dipped to about 30% of what it had been in the early inflation-roaring late seventies and early 1980s.<\/p>\n Those were busy years. I would get up in the morning to do farm chores and help with the kids. Then I would drive 30 miles to CSUF, teach, rush home, spray, irrigate, or fix things, and run inside to work on the book until 1 a.m., drinking a six-pack of Pepsi to stay awake. By 1985, I was a full-time lecturer (with a soon-to-be family of five now comfortably living on $22,000 a year) and the book then-titled\u00a0The Experience of Battle in Classical Greece<\/em>\u00a0was finished.<\/p>\n Then what? I wrote to a few publishers, but a farmer who taught as a temporary lecturer at Fresno State and who had one Italian monograph published was not in high demand by academic presses. So I wrote the following note to John Keegan: \u201cDear Mr. Keegan, You kindly once wrote me a note and asked what was next. I did write a second book. Would you ever be interested in reading it?\u201d<\/p>\n Three weeks later, the following postcard in the same fountain-pen script arrived: \u201cSend it to\u2026.. Regards, JK.\u201d<\/p>\n I did. Six months later, another postcard came: \u201cI like it. Would you like me to write the forward? If so resend the ms. to E. Sifton at Alfred Knopf, my editor. Regards, JK.\u201d<\/p>\n I did. Three months later, Ms. Sifton wrote and agreed to publish it for an advance of $5,000, with a forward from John Keegan. The book did very well and everything after it was not so difficult. I had a falling out with Ms. Sifton over the next book,\u00a0The Other Greeks<\/em>, and then went to the Free Press and Adam Bellow for\u00a0The Other Greeks<\/em>,\u00a0Fields Without Dreams<\/em>,\u00a0The Land Was Everything<\/em>,\u00a0Who Killed Homer?<\/em>,\u00a0The Soul of Battle, Carnage and Culture<\/em>, and\u00a0Ripples of Battle<\/em>. But looking back, a quarter-century later, I realize now that John Keegan was right: she was a wonderful editor, to whom I owe a great deal of gratitude for what became\u00a0The Western Way of War<\/em>. And I have been remiss for not thanking her in print for all she did on that book.<\/p>\n As small thanks, I dedicated an academic, edited book of essays (Hoplites: The Ancient Greek Battle Experience<\/em>) to Keegan, and we kept in touch over the years. When I later met him in Washington, he was not in good health, but he was alert with a photographic memory of our correspondence over the last twenty years.<\/p>\n The sum of Keegan\u2019s work was a writ against war, although he never editorialized so. The empathy for the wretched suffering of combat soldiers was made all the more poignant by his majestic style. Although I never read so, I always wondered whether he was a student of Greek and Latin, given that he had a certain Asiatic style, predicated on variation in sentence structure, length, and grammar, with a vocabulary that could juxtapose the Latinate polysyllabic term next to a two-syllable Anglo-Saxon slang.<\/p>\n Gore Vidal may not have been as poor a writer as I allege, or John Keegan as gifted an historian as I have argued. I met the former at ten, the latter as an adult. One did nothing for me, the other everything. So be it: I will miss not reading another new sentence from Keegan as much as I am unconcerned about the absence of another 500-page book from Vidal.<\/p>\n URLs in this post: \u00a92012 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media I\u00a0confess this is the first time in my life I will break the old Hellenic rule: ton tethnv\u00eakota m\u00ea kakologein(speak no ill of the dead). That Gore Vidal was a cruel person is no excuse for not refraining from criticism after his recent death, but here I sin nonetheless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[99],"tags":[1014,1023,251,107,1028],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-8t","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6566,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-man-for-the-times\/","url_meta":{"origin":525,"position":0},"title":"A Man for the Times","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 30, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's the Corner\u00a0 Al Gore is at it again, recently charging that \u201cAmerican democracy has been hacked\u201d by special interests and accusing his political opponents of \u201cpolitical terrorism.\u201d This comes from a big-government, high-tax advocate who raced to unload his share of a hyped, but failed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Left"","block_context":{"text":"The Left","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/liberalism\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5999,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/flat-earth-democrats\/","url_meta":{"origin":525,"position":1},"title":"Flat-Earth Democrats","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 28, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The victims of the tornado that hit Moore Oklahoma had not even been counted when Democrat politicians made fools of themselves by trying to link the disaster to global warming and Republicans. California Senator Barbara Boxer said, \u201cThis is climate change. We were warned\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Global Warming"","block_context":{"text":"Global Warming","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/global-warming-2\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5418,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/nobel-nobel\/","url_meta":{"origin":525,"position":2},"title":"Nobel Nobel?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 17, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Al Gore's evangelical liberalism reconsidered. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Al Gore embodies a type that usually turns up in high school or university faculties, what we can call the evangelical liberal. These folks believe they have received the revealed truth about everything, and so are entitled to hector\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11460,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-reminder-of-what-binds-us\/","url_meta":{"origin":525,"position":3},"title":"A Reminder of What Binds Us","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 19, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review In these divisive times, one constant for all Americans has been the hallowed work of the American Battle Monuments Commission, the small and sometimes unheralded federal agency created in 1923 to establish, operate, and oversee foreign cemeteries of American war dead, largely from the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11718,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/waging-war-against-the-dead\/","url_meta":{"origin":525,"position":4},"title":"Waging War Against the Dead","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 14, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Civil War"","block_context":{"text":"Civil War","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civil-war\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11668,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/autopsy-of-a-dead-coup\/","url_meta":{"origin":525,"position":5},"title":"Autopsy of a Dead Coup","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 19, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton campaign\u2019s use of funds to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt among high Obama administration officials, a fabricated, opposition smear dossier\u00a0failed. So has the second special prosecutor phase of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=525"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":579,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions\/579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\n[1]\u00a0Julian<\/em>:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/037572706X\/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=037572706X&linkCode=as2&tag=privatepapers-20<\/a>
\n[2]\u00a0Count Belisarius<\/em>:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B001KTSZLG\/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B001KTSZLG&linkCode=as2&tag=privatepapers-20<\/a>
\n[3] the late Christopher Hitchens:\u00a0http:\/\/www.victorhanson.com\/articles\/hanson010412.html<\/a>
\n[4] praised Vidal\u2019s essays:\u00a0http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/eddriscoll\/2012\/08\/04\/gore-vidals-fan-club\/<\/a>
\n[5] into a conspiracy theorist:\u00a0http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/eddriscoll\/2010\/10\/11\/on-experiencing-gore-vidals-favorite-word\/<\/a>
\n[6] infatuation with Timothy McVeigh:\u00a0http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/features\/2001\/09\/mcveigh200109<\/a>
\n[7] the supposedly wannabe Jewish intellectual:\u00a0http:\/\/www.commentarymagazine.com\/2012\/08\/03\/vidal-buckley-and-anti-semitism\/<\/a>
\n[8] Selma:\u00a0http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Selma,_California<\/a>
\n[9]\u00a0The Face of Battle<\/em>:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0140048979\/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0140048979&linkCode=as2&tag=privatepapers-20<\/a>
\n[10]\u00a0Six Armies in Normandy<\/em>:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0140235426\/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0140235426&linkCode=as2&tag=privatepapers-20<\/a>
\n[11]\u00a0The Price of Admiralty<\/em>:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0140096507\/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0140096507&linkCode=as2&tag=privatepapers-20<\/a>
\n[12]\u00a0The Mask of Command<\/em>:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0140114068\/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0140114068&linkCode=as2&tag=privatepapers-20<\/a>
\n[13]\u00a0A History of War<\/em>:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0679730826\/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0679730826&linkCode=as2&tag=privatepapers-20<\/a>
\n[14]\u00a0Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece<\/em>:http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B004CVJVGC\/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B004CVJVGC&linkCode=as2&tag=privatepapers-20<\/a>
\n[15] The Western Way of War:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0520260090\/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0520260090&linkCode=as2&tag=privatepapers-20<\/a><\/p>\n