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When I came to Harvard as a visitor, I expected to teach and return to my rooms to write, having little to do with students aside from workaday routines. But I lived in Kirkland House with almost 400 sophomores, juniors, and seniors, a handful of graduate tutors, and a few other faculty members. Evening meals in the House led to deepening friendships with students and tutors as we talked night after night about politics, about our courses, or about papers we were writing. We had no such ritual at West Point. When cadets sit down, their primary business is eating, eating fast, so they can get back to other commitments. They miss a chance to nourish the mind and the body at the same table. They miss the opportunity to play with ideas. They're too busy.

My students at Harvard were more unusual than I expected them to be. I assumed they would be intellectually bold, bordering on obnoxious; instead they were quiet and rigorous, eager to put their minds to any writing task I devised, no matter how difficult. Ideas intrigued them. At West Point I spent a great deal of time trying to convince bright students that it was all right to be smart, that getting high on the play of the mind could be as exciting as teamwork and victory.

Harvard's admissions people, unlike West Point's, would not put well-roundedness and decisiveness at the top of their wish list. Nor would they cherish adaptability and charisma as the most promising indicators of worth. A sign of brilliance, no doubt, would please them. Perhaps an inclination toward community service. But most important, a quirkiness, an intellectual passion-eccentric, understated-that would set each student apart, distinguishing one from the other. If the greater world reveals itself only to those courageous and daring enough to reimagine and test the very foundations of knowledge, our task, Harvard seems to say, is to nurture and develop minds unsettled and unsettling enough to look into the darkness. And so Harvard clings unconsciously to destruction. Creation lies just on the other side.

West Point, citadel of traditional strength, incites a passion for preservation and leans always toward the status quo. There on the banks of the Hudson, young men (and now young women) wed rugged individualism with adaptability. The army's sublime work is done in concert, individuals so synchronized in their individual efforts they seem graced. A line of glittering sabres on the parade field or a search-and-destroy maneuver in the killing fields dazzles observers, friend and foe alike. Few watch soldiers on parade or at work without feeling the seductive rhythms of their concerted efforts.

Even soldiers' individual acts of heroism-performed as if some force moves them toward sacrifice-even those outrageous acts of destruction seem bent on preserving the sacred lives of fellow warriors. Or if, in retrospect, a soldier chooses to look at his work from another vantage point, distant from the field of battle, he must be able to see that his acts of destruction do indeed preserve the land of the free and the home of the brave. The dirty work of actual destruction must be purified by noble ideas about sacrifice and service and preservation, and certainly no soldier worthy of his citizenship claims destruction as his life's work. His duty is to make things last.

So. Harvard and West Point, at first glance, seem strangely at odds with one another, ideological opposites-institutions polarized by obligations so subtle and yet so fundamental to their very nature that their relationship one to the other remains hidden, unexamined. They do not exchange their gifts. And yet, at the very highest levels of government, the graduates of Harvard and the graduates of West Point seem always to wage war together-politics and might making the world safe for democracy. Still. After all these years and all those wars.

As I got to know the 15 young men and women in my writing class at Harvard, I began to think of what they might be like as army officers. Only three would have made crackerjack lieutenants, comfortable in the grit and grind of the combat soldier's daily life. Yet 10 of those other students in that class of 15 would have made top-notch staff officers without even a day of experience in the trenches. Were I facing a tough problem-any problem-on a high-level staff, I would take one of those 10 or all of them in a minute to help me think-to help me see what I might be unable to see without them. But the U.S. Army as I knew it, corporate and competitive, would not have rewarded those fierce individualists. They would have been restless anyway, waiting during all those years of apprenticeship for a chance to play again with ideas. Strategy and national policy lie outside the purview of company-grade officers.

On the rolling grounds of his wife's family farm just outside Boston, Lieutenant General George S. Patton (retired) raises vegetables and sells them. He's traded his helicopter gunship for a pickup truck, but like his more famous father, he's still full of piss and vinegar. Two years ago, I was sitting in his expansive backyard at a picnic the Pattons give each year for West Pointers. When the general drove up in his pickup, he looked down at me from the cab and announced that he didn't believe he knew me. I stood, walked over to the truck, and told him who I was. He was listening but looking out over the farmland as I talked. When I said that I had retired from a West Point faculty position and was teaching at Harvard, he snapped around and looked me over, head to foot.

"Damn," he proclaimed, after what seemed a long pause, "You've got a haircut, your belly's not hanging over your belt, and you look mean as hell. You're just what Harvard needs." He didn't crack a smile as he drove away.

I had left Harvard at the end of that fall semester with an invitation to return. The invitation had something to do with what I knew about writing. It had nothing at all to do with what General Patton had in mind that day at his farm. The job intrigued me because there was still much to learn at Harvard that I could not learn at West Point, something about the range and play of my own mind working in concert with others who also had a passion for writing. I went back to West Point, passed on the lessons learned, and retired after 28 years of soldiering. Six months after I left Harvard, I was back.

At West Point during that interlude, I found it difficult to fall back into the soldier's rhythms. In Cambridge I had begun to grow accustomed to an intoxicating freedom. I became a boy again at 50, a boy high on the notion that he could follow his spirit wherever it took him.

Satisfaction at first came from my just thinking about new possibilities. I didn't need to do anything. But, before long, I was experimenting, writing into the early morning hours and then sleeping until noon-however and whenever the spirit moved me. I found happiness writing and wandering through my apartment while the rest of the world around me slept, so I was quite surprised when, after a month of meandering, my body collapsed and sickness followed-nausea, hoarseness, even loss of voice.

My life had been built on steadiness and routine, on working in concert with fellow soldiers to create what we called unit cohesiveness-the finest artillery battalion in the country or the best English department we could imagine. When I shifted suddenly from that collective network of support to my own neglected spiritual needs, my body warned me not to fly too high too fast, but I wasn't astute enough to pick up the signals. I called my Harvard sickness the flu.

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