Scholar of Warfare Story aired: Thursday, January 08, 2004
Major John Nagl is a West Point graduate and a Rhodes Scholar. After being awarded a Bronze Star in the Persian Gulf War, he became a scholar specializing in counter-insurgency.
He subtitled his doctoral thesis on the subject "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife," a striking metaphor for how excruciatingly difficult insurgencies can be to control and how much patience ending them requires.
At the moment, Major Nagl is finding out that very thing for himself. Leaving the protected world of military theorizing and think-tanking, he's now the third in command of a tank battalion, fighting not a textbook, but an all too real insurgency in iraq.
Writer Peter Maass recently spent two weeks with Major Nagl. Maass has a piece on the experience in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
