A Special on Military Training Institutions

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host and the star, and the namesake is Victor Davis Hansen, and he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is a special.

This is one of the first of four that we are recording based on questions submitted from our listeners.

And we have three questions.

Before you start, Jack, I got a email last week

from one of our listeners.

And he had heard me on the YouTube and something.

He said,

Victor.

When you are introduced, I noticed two things that are quite frequent.

People use your middle name as David.

And you and Sammy don't do this, so I'm telling you.

I did it once in front of

Sherry Palin, but go ahead.

And then the other thing is they always say institute for institution.

And institution, I think, means it's got a kind of poly interest.

It goes across disciplines where an institute just studies one particular discipline.

But nevertheless, this guy said, I'm so tired of seeing you introduce as Victor David Hansen and from the Hoover Institute and the fact that you never correct people, which

brings up the questions in my, I want to reply to this question because that's what we're thematically focused on today.

I never correct people.

I feel that it's rude.

I've had people, the only time I've corrected somebody, I got introduced

at a university that hated my guts.

And they said,

this is Professor Hansen from fresno state college it's actually cal state university fresno that gives me a little bit of shred of dignity and he

is a colleague of jerry tarkanian

who had an adir there because of nca cheating the basketball coach and he's the the towel the towel chewer the towel chewer

and uh

He is a raisin farmer.

And here he is.

That was my introduction.

Raisin Farmer of Fresno State College and colleague of Jerry Tarcanian.

I actually, I said, I actually have done somewhat more than that, but I'm very honored that I'm a raisin farmer because they're a great bunch of people.

Yeah.

And your product always found its way into my little lunch bag at St.

Barnabas School.

Oh, good.

Maybe you can give me some money after Sunday went broke in 1983 and confiscated $88,000 of our capital retained from our family.

Well, we have, I don't want to correct you, but

we've heard that story.

I apologize if I called the Hoover Institute.

I thought it would do institution, but I never.

No, no, it is the institution.

It's Hoover Institution.

Yeah, yeah, but I never

got Hans.

You've always got both right.

Okay, good.

And I do try to occasionally let.

our listeners know that through my Bronx accent, it's Hans Sun,

not Hans Sen.

We need to switch this.

I always say the same thing.

It's tired, as another person told me.

That's a stale joke, Professor Hansen.

I don't want to hear anymore that a Swede is a Dane with his brains blown out.

Okay, well, I'm trying to get new material.

I'm not going to be a creature of habit.

I'm not in a rut.

I do prepare for these things, and I read two or three hours on the news every morning.

Every morning, yeah, every morning.

We will, on one of these episodes where someone asks, which is not this one, but when someone asks you about your, how you write, your, your habits of writing, we can at the same time repeat that your habits of gleaning.

Yeah, we've done that once before.

I'm a big fan of Powerline.

I really like those guys.

But there are many new listeners

that have come in since then.

So we maybe should regale them.

But Victor, we have to,

you know, we have to do at the beginning of the

podcast.

We have to let listeners know we're going to get to their questions right after these important messages.

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Okay, we're back with the special edition of the Victor Davis Hanson show.

I do want to let our new listeners know that Victor has a website, official website, the blade of perseus, victorhanson.com.

Not Victor David Hanson, not Victor Davis Hanson, VictorHanson.com.

We'll talk about that in a little bit.

So, Victor, knowing ahead of time that you were going to be

away for a part of June and July, you're going to be with Hillsdale on Sailing the Merry Seas.

We put out through this podcast and through a great Facebook group, the Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club, requests for questions.

We got many of them.

So here are some.

We'll do three questions on each show.

Here's the first one for this particular program.

And it's from Dave in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

And he writes,

My dad and both grandfathers were career naval officers, and all three graduated from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.

As a Navy brat, I was born in Annapolis and lived a large part of my childhood there.

By the time I was ready for college, the allure, having lived near and observed the midshipman for attending the U.S.

Naval Academy and my grades and desire to drink beer, smoke pot, and chase co-eds, resulted in attending the University of Maryland, but ultimately attending the United States Marine Corps officer

school and serving eight years in the service my dad jokingly referred to as useless sons made comfortable.

So, given my history, quote-unquote history, regarding the U.S.

Naval Academy, and having heard your laments about Stanford, and understanding you were a professor at the Academy, I would like to hear your thoughts on your experiences there as a professor.

Dave, from San Juan.

Well,

it was a very unique experience because I arrived there on July 1st

of 2002, right in the transition from 9-11 to what would become the Iraq War.

And I left

on July 30th of 2003, right during the so-called insurgency.

I drove across the U.S.

I had a 1995 Mazda.

I didn't realize I had to be there in the summer to report, quote unquote, for duty.

And the car blew up in Dayton, Ohio.

And I had to just wait two days while they tried to find an alternator, and then it had warped the head.

And I limped in at about 40 miles an hour after three more days of driving.

But it was a wonderful place.

I really liked the students.

And the students,

Alex Martin was a student of mine.

I had just

a whole number of wonderful students, and they were really brilliant kids.

and a lot of them served nobly in

the Iraq and Afghanistan war.

Now,

the thing to remember about the Naval Academy is it is not like the Air Force Academy or West Point.

And by that, I mean

the majority of most of the departments

are tenured civilians.

In other words, the Naval Academy has chosen to follow the regular university pattern, non-military.

If you go to

West Point or if you go to Colorado Springs at the Air Force Academy, the majority of faculty are lieutenant colonels, colonels, some majors, but they're in the military and they're there in revolving billets.

Some have permanent billets.

They have a unique system and it was to make the Navy, I guess, more a part of the general culture.

And I don't think it worked.

And so when I was in the Department of History,

there wasn't a classics department there, but I would say 75% of the faculty were civilians.

Many of them had prior military experience, but they were civilians.

And that meant they went through the 10-year process.

And they were there not because they were teaching military history courses, but it was a civilian,

it was a civilian history department.

So there was a Renaissance, there was this, there were that.

And as faculty members, it was a very desirable billet because you were right next to Washington, D.C.

The Naval Academy, in many ways, it's right on the ocean.

And it's beautiful.

I thought the weather in the summer is not very nice.

It's humid.

But nonetheless, people gravitate from the left.

If you're left wing and you get hired at the Naval Academy, that's a very envious position.

And so my point was when I got to the Naval Academy, I had been writing about the war and I think I was the visiting Schifrin professor of military history.

The bid had been made to me, I think, in 1999, but by 2001, I had been associated with the Bush administration, not that I knew them, but just supporting some policies after the contentious 2000 election.

So almost immediately, I was a conservative in a very liberal department.

Some of you are going to say that's impossible.

No, it's not impossible.

That department was very liberal.

Would that have been the same for all departments by your

political science, English, history, philosophy, but not engineering, mathematics, things like that.

I met those groups of faculty members, they were very conservative.

And there were, as I said, somewhere between 25 and 30 percent percent

military officers.

And most of them, not all, most of them were

conservative, I mean, conservative.

But when the war heated up, there was the faculty lounge and they had CNN on one camera television and Fox on the other.

And I can remember that most of the faculty were only watching

the CNN.

And it made it a little bit difficult because Britt Yume had asked me to drive into Washington, I think, for four weekends,

and to be a commentator on the ongoing war.

And I did.

And

so that was more polarizing to some people.

And then

I wasn't, I guess I wasn't shy about

confronting people.

I'll give you one example.

One of the first talks I gave was a military officer who was a professor there.

And remember that if the military officers enjoy being professors there and they want to extend their rotating billet, they have to have the approval of civilians that run the department who grant tenure.

I know that there's a dean that is a military officer, but generally these are self-governing civilian-like systems.

So that means that a lot of the younger military officers who were teaching there ingratiate themselves in the worst case or in the second are indifferent to radical politics.

And this officer was giving a talk, I won't mention his name,

that the campaign to take Iwo Jima in early 1945 was a waste of time.

The enormous 25,000 plus dead that were incurred on the Japanese were sort of a white rage phenomenon of Marines that just wanted to kill people.

We lost 7,000, I think, dead.

And that it had no utility utility according to his research.

That struck me

as wrong, but also

as abhorrent.

My own father, who had flown 40 missions on a B-29 out of Tenyan, had landed on three occasions, I think,

with either

bullet damage or a wounded person or mechanical difficulties.

And they had, Jack, it was

an eight to nine hour flight one way from Tokyo to the Marianas, and that was at night.

And there was no sophisticated navigation.

So a lot of B-29s had not calibrated the eight or nine hours to get over there.

And they only went about 250 miles, 1,600 miles each way.

It's kind of like from San Francisco flying at night without a computer or navigation to Salt Lake City or beyond or Denver.

And then they had to fly back.

And if they didn't calibrate the fuel consumption, they were dead because there was nothing out there.

And there were Japanese planes that would intercept them on the way back.

But once they took Iwo Jima, thanks to the heroism and sacrifice of the Marine Corps, then there was

people have done the formulations and there's a lot of controversy whether they're counting one plane two or three times.

But the number of people who made emergency landings there versus the number of people who were killed, it wasn't even close.

There was a lot more B-29 crews that were able to land there.

This person was arguing, well, they were tired, or it was just a micro, they would have made it anyway, or one, you can't count a B-29 that did there twice.

But his whole idea was

that the Pacific War was a white rage

anti-Asian racist.

Excuse me, this was a military officer,

military officer, and this was to the

people were supportive of it.

And I was getting angry and frustrated.

And then a wondrous thing happened.

There was a professor there whom I became best friends with, Miles Yu.

And he had been a dissident in China at Tenement Square and fled for his life after bravely protesting the Chinese communist government.

He got his family out.

And he went.

I think he went to Swathmore and he got a PhD from Berkeley.

And he was a professor of history at the Naval Academy.

And he was a scarred veteran of suffering under communism.

And he was actually

writing essays and what then was the equivalent of a podcast, trying to warn people about Chinese espionage, etc.

So the point was he read some Japanese, and of course he was fluent in Chinese.

And he interrupted in the question when this guy, when I was attacking my question and said, you don't know what you're talking about.

Japanese killed 16,000, 16 million Chinese.

They ran a racial war.

Of all the armies, militaries in World War II, they had the highest kill ratio versus losses suffered, despite Nagasaki, Hiroshima, civilian, military, put them all together, and they killed more people and lost fewer in that calculus than Germany.

So they were a lethal killing machine.

And then he went on to explain what what sources in the Japanese thought about Iwo Jima.

And, of course, the Japanese felt that they had to hold the island because they felt that they were inflicting losses, mechanical losses, especially on B-29s, by denying them not only the base for sanctuary and repair, but they had Japanese zeros and more sophisticated raiding fighters based there that could intercept

the B-29s, who were they were not able to be escorted all the way to Tokyo, even by, you know, P-51s, et cetera.

So he just demolished that guy.

And that was a really good experience for me because Miles and I,

his name was, he was born as Mao Chung, as

everybody was during the Cultural Revolution.

And I always called him Mao, but

he was.

He became very well known.

He's now, he was the Chinese advisor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

We talked about him on a recent podcast.

He writes for Strategica.

Yes, he does.

And he's a member of our group.

And so we kind of bonded the whole year as the two conservatives.

And there were maybe two or three others.

The other thing happened as the war progressed.

Remember, when the statue fell, about 88% of the Americans polled support of George W.

Bush.

Everybody had said, I was for the war.

There were 23

resolutions that were approved by the U.S.

Senate and the House, and they only four of them were WMD.

They were things like the Marsh Arabs.

We've gone through this before, suicide bombing on

Abu Nadal, all of the terrorists that he was harboring, all the violations of the 91 Accords,

giving suicide bombers money.

genocide of the Kurds of the Marsh Arabs.

But that was all forgotten because by the time I left in July, the insurrection had started.

And suddenly, many of the architects of the war,

Richard Pearl or maybe a David Fromman, the narrative was changing among a lot of the neocons.

It was sort of now, my brilliant planned three-week war.

was destroyed by your,

pointing to the Bush administration, your lousy, screwed up peace.

And therefore, I'm not responsible for the mess that's in Iraq.

I thought that was very unfair to the soldiers, some of whom were my students that were on their way to Iraq when I left.

It got very contentious because there was also a professor there whom I won't name.

And there was a very sweet kid there who had graduated from the,

and I'll get back to her in a minute, but

He had graduated.

He was beloved by everybody, and he worked for a defense contractor, and he was subject to recall as a member of the Naval Reserve, especially because he had

language fluency that was relevant to the Middle East.

That's as much as I can tell you about it.

And he went over there, and he was communicating with email with members of the faculty, and everybody was following his progression.

I think he was in Kuwait training people about how to interrogate in Arabic, particular

prisoners and things.

So he was a consultant, a very sweet person, very capable, very brave.

It was very tragic because he had a wife and two kids.

He,

during the course, he was called to go into the war theater.

This is a long explanation about Gibson the request from the writer, some idea of the atmosphere.

So

he went back into the

the field of combat.

And I don't know if it was at Kirkirk or where it was, Taji, but in the course of his training on site, he requested to go into town to get a better feel.

And I'm remembering something that happened 20 years ago.

So if some of the listeners know about it,

I plead there might be some details I can't remember completely.

But he, in the process, in a routine traffic stop, somebody in the insurrection shot him and killed him.

And it was just terrible because he was

out of the military.

He had done distinguished service.

He was an excellent student.

He was the favorite of the history department.

He volunteered.

He was going to volunteer probably, but he was called up.

He went over to Kuwait, which wasn't as dangerous, but it was just

a freak thing that he was deployed for a week or something like that to train people on site.

He requested to get out of the compound.

And I think the person person with him was killed too, his guard or his driver, who was an American

U.S.

military personnel.

And I felt terrible.

But what I'm getting at, this professor essentially said that I was responsible

because I had supported the war.

And then there was, yeah, there was an effort to raise money.

And I was told that I was not to give any money to this fund because I was culpable.

At that point,

I

got very angry at

that atmosphere.

Also, at this time, I had gotten to know Donald Lumsfeld.

I know people think he's controversial, and I know that he could be a crop, but he was,

I was also talking to the Andrew Marshall's Office of Net Assessment.

You had to have a security clearance.

It was just, it wasn't about Iraq.

It was on the history of war in general and the histories of insurgencies in Rome and Greece, Middle Ages, etc.

So I would lecture on a historical topic, and then the members of that group would try to ask me questions about

which tactics or hearts and minds, et cetera, were effective in the past.

And so I was going up there, and at some point, Rumsfeld

heard about it, and he asked me to come and do the same thing to him, one-on-one.

So maybe

on a Friday morning after I taught, I would go up down to Washington and meet him, and we would talk about history.

And he was a fascinating character.

he talked about everything

his his years at monsanto and he was he had the rumsfeld foundation he was planning even then i was a board member of for a while he had been a fighter pilot hadn't he he had he had he was very courageous he was like an all he had a wonderful wife yeah and he had a very lovely guy brilliant remember victoria coates yeah she was an art historian And she was working, I think she was working closely with him.

He had the other person, the Fox commentator, is a speechwriter, you know, Mark,

you remember his name?

Mark, he's on all the time.

Mark

all the time.

Yeah, Wall Street Journal columnist.

I'll just my name.

He'll come to him.

Same hockey lover.

Yes.

Anyway, he had wonderful people around him.

And so I enjoyed that.

But at one point, I remember him saying, I was surprised.

And he said, how do you endure that at the Naval Academy?

And I thought he'd heard about it.

He hadn't heard a thing about me.

He was just saying that we've had problems at the Naval Academy because it's ultra-liberal and it functions as a civilian organization.

And at that point,

there were some other questions that came up.

And I remember very contentious.

The superintendent, the commandant, not the

head of the entire Naval Academy had been dismissed because he had been jogging.

He went through security.

You all had to go to security.

And I guess he felt the rules were that every Marine officer had to recognize him by sight as part of their job.

One of them didn't and insisted that he produce ID, which he didn't have.

And there, and he got vindictive.

And then the Marine Corps came in.

Don't you know who I am?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the result was that it was clear when I left that he was going to leave.

It was a disastrous tenure on his part.

But my point is that it was a very strange time in defense of the Naval Academy.

It was politicized.

The war was going bad.

The Bush administration had been ultra-popular.

And by the time I left, it was unpopular.

There was an anti-war movement in Washington.

I had been doing Fox commentary, which I don't think was very popular

about the post-war challenges with Britt Hume.

And

it was just, it wasn't a fun time in my life.

It really was.

Had you retired from Cal State?

No, no.

I was just on leave of absence for one year.

And so I was not making as much money as I was.

And when I had to have my travel expenses all the way over there,

I took kind of a financial hit.

I had three children and a wife.

So the kids were in school.

So I had promised them that I would fly home every two weeks.

And one of them would fly every other weekend.

And that cost me about $10,000.

So my youngest daughter, Susanna, would fly on one weekend i'd fly home on the next

and then pauline my oldest daughter would fly the the other one then i'd fly on the next then my son bill would fly right and

it was i mean i had to teach monday wednesday i i taught every day but my class wasn't out till 12 or one o'clock till two on fridays so i was literally running out to and I didn't know Annapolis very well.

I had this old beat up Mazda that had blown the head gasket and they had, I didn't have money to buy a new car, so they put a,

you know, once you blow a head gasket on a Mazda, it's done for.

But I insisted that I didn't have the money, so I had them put a new gasket.

Never ran right, the compression was bad.

Had to have it sent home in a truck.

I should have just sold it.

Oh, my gosh.

Anyway, I'd go to BWI in Baltimore, and then I'd fly home, and I'd get home maybe at midnight.

to Fresno on the last flight from Phoenix.

And then I would be here one day,

Saturday, and then I'd go back to the airport, and then my kids would come the same way.

And it was very hectic.

I don't have a positive memory of it.

I love the Naval Academy students.

I love the military officers.

I love the campus.

I'd go swimming in the pool.

I'd go look at the John Paul Jones.

I'd go to the Naval Club with Miles every luncheon.

We had great conversations.

I went over to his house a lot, met a lot of people he knew, but I was very unpopular, put it that way.

I don't think I had nothing.

This is 2002.

So this is

2002 and 3.4 wokeness is

full bloom.

God knows how you'd be treated today.

No,

I wouldn't be allowed on the campus.

So when I see the wokeness from the chief of naval operations or the chairman of the joint chiefs or the different, it makes, it's just an extension of what I saw there.

And the students knew it.

And when I complained a couple of times to the commandant and the superintendent, they got very defensive and said, this is what we want.

We want a left-wing adversarial culture so that our

students understand what America is all about.

And I said, this an academic left-wing mind is not what America is about.

So

it was problematic.

Not all the faculty were that way.

I developed four or five other friends, but I was kind of isolated and I didn't have any money, had a wrecked car, I was staying in a little apartment.

And,

you know, I wasn't used to living in snow in the winter and humidity.

And then I was away from my family.

And I had, you know, at that time, my house, I hadn't started doing anything on it.

It was 130 years old, falling apart.

So when I got home on Saturdays, I was always on the roof or under the foundation fixing stuff or stopped up drain.

And then I'd fly back.

And

I had just written Carnage and Culture.

And it it came out a week before 9-11.

And

it was a good book, but it wasn't going anywhere.

But suddenly I did a book TV, and the topic wasn't the book.

It was on 9-11.

And I connected it to the Western military tradition, and I tried to tell everybody in that tense time in which we didn't have a lot of confidence.

I said, don't worry.

This will not stand.

The United States will react and we'll take Afghanistan and we will probably go into Iraq, whether you agree or not.

But we, I don't know.

And I said, I don't know whether we can stabilize it, but we can take out that government in a matter of weeks.

I said that.

And it's on the cover of one of the Autumn of War.

I think I said that quote.

But anyway, the point I'm making is

that book TV went viral.

And the next thing I knew, it was a bestseller book.

It sold a quarter million copies.

So when when I got to the Naval Academy,

it was a controversial book because a lot of academics didn't believe that there was any singularity or exceptionalism to the Western military tradition.

So if I said that what won at Marathon or Plataea or Salamis or gave Romans an advantage that couldn't be explained by population or territory, or allowed Byzantium to stand, I wasn't saying they won in all cases, but I just said this paradigm of Western civilization, consensual government, free markets, technology, rationalism, separation between religion often, or more separation, and individualism, all of those explain why, despite catastrophic defeats and being outnumbered and splits between Orthodoxy and Catholicism and Protestantism, they had advantages.

And those advantages are

are there in the real world, that a Chinese military officer looks like us.

We don't look like him.

In other words, he doesn't use traditional Chinese garb or he doesn't have traditional Chinese weaponry.

And I said,

we don't have a monopoly on genius, when there's an invention that the Chinese develop like gunpowder, we do know how to steal things better than people and improve them and subject them to market profiteering.

So I went through all of that and it was very popular, but I got, John Keegan wrote a nice introduction.

I had a lot of very positive reviews, but the academic world went crazy about that book.

They got, they said it was a triumphalism, Western chauvinism.

I was out of my field.

I was on the board of Orion, a journal, and they commissioned a guy who hated my guts because I had said, you know, that you can, that bombing

on the March 11th fire rage of Japan, it was regrettable, but we did give leaflets, and Japan deliberately put

decentralized their aircraft and arms munition industries in civilian sectors so that people were, you know, assembling a propeller blade on their kitchen table and then, you know, deliberately so we wouldn't do it.

So you could argue that LeMay was uncouth, but there was an argument to be made given that 20,000 people a day were being killed.

in the Pacific and Asia by the Japanese Imperial military.

But he got, this person was very close close to Japan, got very angry and asked if he could review it.

And just, I thought it was one of the most dishonest reviews.

You can go look at it.

But anyway.

Who interviewed you on,

who did the book sign?

I did it myself.

I just did a book sign.

It was just a routine

on event.

I went to a Fresno bookstore.

There was 50 people, and then they put it on.

And I kind of said, The questions were kind of, well, what do we do?

And how do they do this?

I said, don't worry.

It was a lapse.

That's not typical.

Americans and the Westerners know how to respond.

We're going to respond.

We're going to find out who did it.

We're going to go back and bomb them.

He will not be in Afghanistan.

I don't know if he'll be dead or not, but he will not be there a month from now.

Bin Laden.

Everybody thought he was a superman.

And then I said, Saddam will not be there very long.

And I, you know, I said, it's going to be messy.

I don't know if we should nation, but they're not going to be there.

And I people interpret that and it went viral.

and that that alone not the book sold the book but

okay what i'm getting at was i was when i was at the naval academy that book was very controversial and people that were on the faculty didn't like it and so everything was kind of a perfect storm and i was very i liked the academy i thought i felt very honored.

They had asked me.

There was a professor there, Richard Abels, very kind to me, Miles, of course.

There were a lot of nice people, but the atmosphere, the students were wonderful, but the atmosphere of the administration and

the faculty, I was not prepared for.

I had thought that it was going to be a very Air Force-like or

West Point-like environment, and it was more like a Mark Milley-Lloyd Austin

campus.

I think, and until recently, most Americans were probably under the same illusion or perception that this was

a place for the United States.

The reason is that it is ADAP, it is adopted from the blueprint of an American university.

And West Point and

the Air Force Academy function on different premises.

Victor, I have a related question or two to the Naval Academy, and let's because these programs are going to be a little shorter.

So let me get to that right after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is the first of four special episodes we're recording.

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So, Victor, staying a little on things naval, I guess

this might be the final question.

We may not be able to get to three questions today, but

there is, okay, we have four academies, if you want to include the Coast Guard Academy.

We have a Naval War College, do we not?

We have an Army War College.

We have a Naval Institute.

So, I'm just, there's two parts.

Have you taught taught or lectured at any of these other schools and/or

institutes?

And as regards the Naval Institute,

which is the home of Proceedings, I believe, the

important,

maybe it wasn't, it's not anymore, I'm not sure, but

Proceedings.

Have you had any relationships?

relationship with the Naval Institute, annual proceedings?

Yeah, that the Naval Institute press is on the campus of annapolis and i they they during that period of 2002 three the editor at the time asked me to

make a summary of was of uh carnage and culture so i did write an article about it for the proceedings and i think i went over there three or four times and uh to consult about they wanted me as a referee so i was trying in my role as a chifrin professor i was trying to do things in, I don't know, university service as part of the job as being a professor.

So yes, I did go over and consult and like the people very much and had they had a lot of great stories about Tom Clancy and the Hunt for Red or October, which was a Naval Institute Press.

And I think they had the contract.

I think they, you know, nobody would publish Tom Clancy, believe it or not, that great novel until.

the Naval Institute Press published it.

Did you meet him while you were there?

No, I didn't.

I take that back.

I did meet him once.

I remember it was in Washington, D.C., and it was a naval, it wasn't the Naval Academy event.

It was either a Naval Alumni or something, but I did meet him.

He had something wrong with his, I remember his eyes.

Terrible eyesight.

Well, yeah, it was almost like he couldn't, his eyes were squinty, and he had eyelid problems.

And he wasn't well.

I remember that.

But

I did like the Naval Institute Press, and they would tell me the story of Tom Clancy, how he submitted the manuscript.

They didn't really read it at first.

They saw there was potential there.

They gave him, I think, a $4,000 or $5,000.

And

they got the paperback rights.

And then Reagan, somebody put it on Reagan's desk, and Reagan loved it.

He just stopped everything and read it.

And then he went to a press conference and said, you got to read this book.

It was either a press conference

and it went viral.

And this little university press then was sold out.

And more importantly, they thought they had the paperback rights.

And then he broke the contract and sold it to a trade publisher.

And he made a fortune in the West's history.

So, yeah, I've been, I went to Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania that year, and I have since.

I maybe

I've spoken at the Army War College five or six times.

I've spoken at Camp Lejeune.

I did a special three-day billet for the Bush administration when I went down to Camp Pendleton.

And there was a project

with

the department, the

NEH to get returning veterans from Iraq to write their war memoirs.

And so I went down there and I met with them and talked about how to write memoirs and stuff like that.

I like going to the Army War College.

I did that a lot, maybe four or five times.

I was the Nimitz visiting professor at UC Berkeley.

That was a very different performance.

If I said to the audience, which would you rather be, a visiting professor at the Naval Academy or a visiting Nimitz professor at Berkeley?

And Berkeley, of course, was not, it was only, I think, two weeks.

It wasn't long, but you had to give, I think, five.

Which would most academics that were conservative prefer?

They preferred to go to the Naval Academy.

And lo and behold, I had exactly the opposite experience.

I went to Berkeley.

The people who ran the Nimitz program were wonderful.

The students were ROTC and Stanford didn't have a program, so they were bringing in students from Stanford and a lot of the UC campuses.

Berkeley had one and it was wonderful.

I had a, I didn't know that I,

the only bad thing about it, I kept getting,

I would give a lecture and run out and vomit.

And I thought it was nerves.

I never had that.

And then as soon as I left, I had to get on a plane and fly fly to Libya because this travel group had hired me to speak on the, they'd hired me to speak on the mosaics at Sabratha and Leftist Magna, which hadn't been open to the public.

There'd only be 40 visas issued.

And of course, I had a ruptured appendix.

It was already leaking.

I didn't know it.

And I got on that plane, got to Libya, and it burst.

And I almost died.

But that's another story.

But anyway, the point was that it was wonderful being at

UC Berkeley and the Nimitz.

I really enjoyed enjoyed it.

So I've done a lot.

I said, I must have met with the Office of Net Assessment four or five times.

At the Hoover Institution, until recently, I participated every year.

We would bring out Naval, Air Force, and Army officers from all over the world, and then they would visit particular programs, and one of which was the Hoover.

So I'd always give lectures three days in a row to those groups.

So I've had a long association with the military.

I used to, we used to have, we have a program called the Security Fellows, and we bring a member from each branch as well as a diplomatic corps for their, between that key period of lieutenant colonel to colonel, they select about 2% of the lieutenant colonels they think are going to make colonel or will make it or have made it.

And they have a choice of going to the Kennedy School of Government or Hoover.

And a lot of them pick Hoover.

And I was asked by our late

director to do something with them.

So I came up with two things.

One was we had a wonderful guy named Jack Littlefield and his brother.

The Littlefields are just wonderful people.

And they were quite wealthy.

Their father had been, I think, the chief stockholder, but they were philanthropists.

And Jack Littlefield created the largest

tank museum west of the Mississippi.

In the hills of Woodside, I believe it, this Tony community above 280.

And so he would have me come out and we would discuss the fighting characteristics of a Panther.

He actually, right before he died, he was negotiating to get a tiger.

And what he really taught me was that the Sherman tank had been

underestimated.

And I talked to the mechanics and they showed me how long it took to take an engine out of a T-34 or a Panther or a Mark Farr versus a Sherman.

And there was.

Did you see him?

Did they, were they active?

Did you actually ride in it in one of the,

I mean, he had, yeah, well, I was in Iraq and I drove a T-72.

So

I was out of firing range and this Iraqi guy said, well, why are you shooting an AK-47?

Get in the tank.

You can drive it.

And I went in.

I thought, and you know what it was?

It was just like my grandfather's old caterpillar.

He had a 1947 cat with little levers, you know, to control it rather than the steering wheel.

So it was, I, you know, it was kind of like popping that, it was kind of fun.

But I would take the security fellows from the branches of the military, and we went out to the Littlefield Museum, and then Jacques gave a lecture, and then I would tour all the tanks.

He had maybe 80, 90, 100 of them all over the world.

World War I, all the way.

He had everything over there.

And he had five or six full-time mechanics that were restoring them.

And then the other aspect of it, every year I took them for a lunch with Tom Soule, and they loved it uh

tom was in his late 70s he's 94 and he and i had a i think i mentioned had a ritual for 15 years that once twice a month we met for lunch yeah and nobody else but i always tried to bring people because

Everybody wanted to meet Tom Soule.

And I ended up just worshiping Tom.

I still do.

And we communicate, not as frequently, but as we did, but we were best friends.

He didn't come into Hoover a lot because he was so busy writing.

He wrote nonstop at home.

But these four officers then would go to lunch with Tom, and he was just delightful.

He was in the Marine Corps himself.

Right.

Right.

It was very, I've had a lot of

that's terrific.

Hey, Victor, we're going on too long.

Well, that's all right, but we have time for one more very short question, very short answer, and we'll get to that right after this final message.

Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, quick question and an on-the-spot reflection.

As you met, you brought up this C-SPAM book TV interview that

greatly impacted the sales of a book.

Was that, as you look back on your life, I mean, it's uh I mean, you are, we are all where we're at for who knows what reasons, but was that a kind of a

seminal little unexpected event that put your life in a different trajectory or not really?

Did that matter?

Did the

financially?

I had been insanely

farming full-time when I got my PhD in 1980.

And then

I went...

as a part-time lecturer at Cal State Fresno, the nearest campus.

And then I was there for 21 years, but I was still involved in farming.

I was signing, co-signing these huge loans, and farming was really bad, especially raising and tree food.

So I had nothing.

And suddenly, to have a book that sold, and I had written, you know, five or six books, but none of them had the success.

I think if I was to spot, identify a seminal moment, it was this.

I was an obscure professor at Cal State Fresno in my

late 20s and early 30s.

And I had this idea of writing about Greek warfare from the John Keegan point of view.

But

when I published my thesis, an Italian publisher, UC Press, eventually did this paperback, but it was a University of Pisa.

Who would ever read it?

And so they said,

it was beautifully produced.

I mean, gosh, it was like a medieval manuscript.

It was so, the pages, and it was just wonderful.

But I didn't have anybody anybody to send it to.

I mean, I wasn't a scholar anymore.

I was just a farmer.

So they, Emilio Gabba was a wonderful classicist, very famous Greek historian.

So he wrote me a letter and said, we need to send this to somebody.

We'll send it.

You have three people.

Who do you want?

So I sent one to John Keegan.

I didn't know who he was.

I loved the face of battle.

But imagine getting this weird.

Italian-purduced book called

Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece.

And he wrote back

and said, this is the most fascinating thing I've ever read about agriculture and war.

It's great.

And he wrote it, you know, in longhand as he did with his fountain pen.

And at the bottom, he said, P.S., if you ever write a book again,

send it to me at this address.

So I put that little thing in an envelope and I said, I'm going.

At that point, I wasn't going to write again.

I was so sick of academia.

But I had this idea, and I had mentioned it to my thesis advisor, I said, said, I'd like to describe what battle was actually like for Greeks.

How much of the armor weigh?

Did they defecate?

Did they urinate?

Were they subject to panic?

How do they kill people in battle?

I don't want to talk about strategy and tactics, just the environment.

And I did.

It was called the Infantry Battle in Classical Greece.

And that became the subtitle.

The publisher, who's a wonderful, brilliant woman, Elizabeth Sifton and Alfred Knopf, which was very, you know, premier.

So

I had sent it everywhere and I was getting nowhere.

And then I remembered I had that letter in my thing that was now four years old.

So I wrote, dear John Keegan, this is Victor Davis Hanson.

You do not remember who I was, but you said nice things about my thesis that was published.

And you said if I ever needed anything,

And

I just forgot about it.

And he never wrote back for a month.

And then all of a sudden, sudden, I got a note.

And it was one sentence, Jack.

And it said,

the editor-in-chief of Alfred Knopp will be calling you.

That was all.

And this woman called me and she said, John Keegan wants me to read a manuscript.

And I don't know if I can promise you he hasn't read it, but he assures me it will be good.

And I said, well, that's nice of him.

Do you have, and do you have a manuscript?

And I said, yes.

And so I sent it.

And she called back and said,

well,

we're not going to, Alfred Kanop's not going to publish a book by the name of Infantry Battle in Classical Greek, but you're talking about a whole mentality that became

enshrined, you know, of decisive battle in the West.

So if you let us allow us to call it the Western way of war and have an epilogue that puts it a lot wider, we will publish it.

And then she called back the next day, and John Keegan's going to write the forward oh damn and i thought wow and then it was just i was nobody and then all of a sudden i get a check in the mail for five thousand dollars for advance i mean that's not anything today but at that time yeah yeah i immediately took all the broken windows out of the farmhouse and put double pane windows for four thousand four thousand eight hundred and eighty eight dollars i still am

and and anyway then

all of a sudden people saw john keegan forward It was a history book alternate selection.

It was book of the month prime selection.

And that thing,

at that point, I could get published by trade.

I think it sold 50,000 copies in its initial runs.

I still get,

I mean, I always think of all the things.

Yeah, I used to buy.

I used to buy titanium bats for my son on the high school and his friends on the baseball team.

I bought my youngest daughter's braces with it for the real world.

He checks every year.

He was the one, and I got to know him.

When I was in England, I visited him and he came to the States.

And he was a wonderful guy, but he really, I owe most of my career to him.

If he hadn't done that, I don't think I would have ever been published.

Well, that's a great story, Victor.

Hey, that's

all everything you've...

you talked about today was terrific.

I

know it's not about,

we're not asking about current issues, the issues of the day, but it's all very fascinating.

And I'm sure most of our listeners and more listeners will be rightly fascinated by what you discussed.

So thanks, Victor, for that.

Thanks, everyone, for listening to this special edition, special episode.

And we will be back in a few days with yet another special episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thank you, and bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone.