War Stories: What West Point graduates are reading in Iraq

bases, made sergeant, and in 1944 shipped out to India, where he spent the rest of the war monitoring radio-range beacons. Over the years he occasionally rewarded my requests for wartime stories: the time in Muskogee, Oklahoma, when he told an impatient general screaming into his radio for taxiing instructions to cut his engine and "stand by" while he cleared the field for an emergency. Or the morning in Agra, when a Gurkha presented on a bayonet the rat that had earlier awakened my father by nibbling on his hand. I never imagined that these adventures were not equally thrilling to him that he might in fact have craved distraction from that very life while living it. Thus, although I teach literature at the United States Military Academy to men and women who will upon graduation become Army lieutenants, it only recently occurred to me to ask my father what he read during the war. He recalled a long list of books read offduty in India, while overhead the Skytrains ferried the wounded to Karachi; brought in tungsten, green tea, and tin from China; or