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Back at West Point what I remembered and cherished most from Harvard were the days free from organizational restraints, days of writing, long lunches with colleagues, spaces that I could fill any way I chose. I had no obligation to the Harvard writing program except the one class I taught-no obligation to shape the program or question it or try to improve it. I was at Harvard to teach and observe, to learn and live. Period. So when I was back at West Point, the eight-to-five office day began to weigh heavily on my soul as I sat waiting for retirement and a new beginning.

My thoughts about what West Point could learn from Harvard were not radical. I wanted more space in a cadet's daily life, more time for thinking and personal interactions. West Point required 12 more courses than Harvard for graduation, plus military science instruction and a demanding physical-education program. Cadet life itself added to the burden-marching, running, marching, cleaning, marching, cooperating, marching.

Even the academic side of West Point's house falls prey to the emphasis on time management and efficiency. The life of the mind-the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake-lags far behind in priority even though teaching and education remain paramount, always, for West Point's military faculty. It is not the play of the mind that West Point cherishes, but the application of mind. Plug and chug, cadets call it-the application of knowledge always winning out over the sheer thrill of thinking.

West Point measures success in utils. One foot in front of the other. Getting to the assigned place at the assigned time…and winning. "There is," as Douglas MacArthur told us so long ago, "no substitute for victory!" Those hallowed words, etched in the gray walls of the gymnasium, echo across the Plain where MacArthur stands stone still forever, watching parades, listening certainly for what he called the "strange mournful mutter of the battlefield."

There are no words etched anywhere at West Point about the value of the mind's work, and in all my years there, I never heard an old soldier come back to address young cadets who had anything to say about the mind's value. Always they came to render after-action reports, celebrating victory, erecting against the ravages of time monuments to their own magnificence…and West Point's. Many of those old soldiers were brilliant in their own right. Many. But they inadvertently repudiated the mind, turning always away from it in silence, never acknowledging what mind itself had to do with action, their action-all action except the most heroic, and that comes from somewhere so deep down it can't be taught or thought. Silence about mind, in a place like West Point, underscores and perpetuates the notion that the most holy form of theory is action. Harvard would give me back what I had freely surrendered at 19 to the U.S. Army. Service to the nation had been for me just what MacArthur said it is, a matter of "patriotic self-abnegation." But I know now what I did not know then. Military service need not come at the expense of a man's soul. West Point had failed to teach me that. Harvard would remind me of the loss, and give me as well a clearer sense of how the soldier and the scholar-the West Pointer and the Harvardian-might trade gifts and both be spared the loss of soul.

After I returned to Harvard, one of my students wrote a stunning essay about beauty. He suggested that the house of cards his uncle used to build for him held one long and enduring fascination-the chance to pull the card that would destroy the house. "The only good way to get a sense of the delicate precision involved in creating it," Gian wrote, "was to touch it gently, to try to alter it ever so slightly, and have it crumple to nothing." There was not anything malicious about pulling the card, but there was something powerful about it, something lasting in the stolen glimpse of beauty that revealed itself only in the moment of destruction.

I wonder now if Gian Neffinger wasn't onto a mystery beyond the reach of his experience. I had never been able to understand the scene in Patton when Old Blood and Guts stands on the battlefield in Italy, gazing out over the smoking debris, the charred bodies-the carnage that is war-and exclaims with passionate conviction, "God, I love it." That was a scene against which I once measured my fitness to command a combat division and came up short. I didn't have it in me to be sanctified by my own destructiveness.

I suspect now that Patton must have seen in all that carnage a touch of beauty such as a man sees reflected in the face of a woman transformed momentarily by his love. In her radiance, he glimpses himself. For a fleeting moment, she is a part of his handiwork. But as she awakens again to her own independence, he cannot bear what he sees-the loss, the beauty of that intoxicating togetherness. That's her allure and war's. She and war allow a man to taste the complexity of his own powermaking-Venus and Mars and Pygmalion all at once, creating a reality no mortal can bear for long and few can live without. The intoxication can be habit-forming and destructive and beautiful.

If we divorce the carnage of Patton's battlefield from an elusive idea about that carnage-Patton's own grand conception of himself as a charismatic, historical figure with a sacred mission-we have left only the fact of carnage itself. In that unadorned fact, no one but a psychotic can see beauty. It is altogether too ghastly to look at. But we know that the consequence of the soldier's deed can never be disentangled from the idea that motivated it. So, in the final analysis, it is the purity of the idea itself that determines how we view the carnage. We redeem such destruction only through acts of mind-long before the deed is done or long after, depending on our predisposition.

What makes me shudder in this, my fifty-fourth year, is not our capacity for idea-making but our instinctive urge to lash out as a way of defending and preserving what we hold most sacred-ourselves, our loved ones, the nation, an idea. Deep within us we know that to strike out is to affirm ourselves against the odds, even if there's destruction in it. Striking out as a nation-warring-is nothing more than a collective manifestation of that instinctive urge. W. B. Yeats saw in that manifestation a pattern-man's habitual acts of destruction playing themselves out on a grand scale, again and again. As he looked down upon that "tragic scene," he conjured a cheerful resignation and imagined a kind of "gaiety transfiguring all that dread."

After a life of soldiering that was both real and vicarious-my brothers' war in Europe, mine in Vietnam, my students' in the Gulf-I have nothing but scorn for Yeats's transfiguring gaiety. I find little consolation in the false notion of inevitability. Nothing actually demands that we turn our a priori self-preserving aggression into cycles of destruction. We perform the deeds. We do it to ourselves. Seduced by a transfiguring notion about inevitability or another about noble service, we may forget that, in the end, our survival on this earth may depend on nothing more complicated than a different idea-one that speaks in a different way about communal responsibilities.

About two months ago, I got a call from a young navy lieutenant, a Harvard man. As a veteran of the Gulf War, he had gotten more than he bargained for from George Bush, who seemed to have a penchant for drawing lines in the sand-as if he and the Pattons had cut their eye teeth on the same grandiose notions of statesmanship and might. War had not inspired Pat to trail glory behind him. He called about loss.

During his last sea voyage, he was at the helm of his carrier late at night, all alone. His father, along on the cruise as a guest of the U.S. Navy, was asleep with the other men below deck. Lieutenant Patrick Long was the man in charge, completing the last leg of a long journey.

"You know, sir, it got to me that night. Those 5,000 men asleep below the deck were in my keep. Every move I made affected them-whether they knew it or not. Going into port, I knew I'd be giving up that responsibility. I'd never feel it again, and I knew I'd miss it."
"I know what you mean," I said.
"No one else at Harvard would," he told me.

I think he was right. Most here wouldn't be able to fathom the mystery of command that binds people together in those benevolent hierarchies, creating what my friend Roy Reed calls the "throngs of community." Harvard can pay respect to such an idea, but it's an idea that doesn't take root here. The reality of shared responsibility and teamwork is as hard to experience at Harvard as unfettered freedom is at West Point.

Harvard is a loose federation of individuals isolated from one another by the very acts of mind that make this a great university. No one can be around Harvard long without experiencing bouts of insecurity in the face of astonishing performances by so many gifted people. Yet those others-those other gifted people-do little to create the despair. Harvardians do it to themselves, individually, within their own minds. Clear signs of such turmoil come from undergraduates late at night when alcohol (or despair itself) cracks the thin veneer of restraint, and a young man lashes out in an outrageous act of self-affirmation or assertion, smashing glass entryway doors or walking from roof to roof down a line of cars leaving his mark-just for a night.

Given a faculty that also isolates itself, Harvard students learn little about mutual support from their elders. Those in positions of leadership seem to know almost nothing about enabling hierarchies. Because they have long been caught up and consumed in a world of their own idea-making, they have been denied a lasting return on communal investments.

At West Point, from day one-even as cadets are learning to stand up under the most grueling individual tests-they are always investing themselves in each other's lives. They repeat over and over their mantra of survival. Cooperate and graduate. Cooperate and graduate. Few believe they can make it alone. Those who try usually fail. A lone rifleman does not wage war and win.

Within those enabling hierarchies, soldiers know their places and can express and work out their frustrations within a protective organizational framework. What they need to know for survival, they learn from leaders tasked to look out for their welfare. Every person becomes an integral part of a team, and teams make it together-whether an 11-man infantry squad or an international joint force of 500,000. But, of course, a soldier has to tuck part of his psyche away to get the job done, and therein lies the corporate danger-a loss of soul, a narrowing of the range of consciousness.

The West Pointer in me yearns for more community than Harvard affords, and I see signs of yearning all around me. But leaders here, primarily men-bound as they are to notions of fierce individualism and the libertarian's idea of unfettered freedom-find it difficult to imagine how to create hierarchies that stabilize lives and generate synergy while still preserving the right to one's own ideas and own way of doing things. Few here can imagine that doing it your own way need not mean doing it alone.

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