trying to grok

Soldier Boy has been through the same thing! Even when he was in Korea for a year, he got a book on the language and learned how to communicate while he was there, learned the customs and courtesies. He has quite a few books that he's gotten about war in general, and these wars in specific. He's waiting to know a little bit more about the area they're being deployed to before he starts digging up as much local info as possible.

And yes, he's the only one I know of in his company who is doing that.

I got a book from a publisher some time back about a professor teaching literature to cadets at West Point. It is called "Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point" by Elizabeth D. Samet. Interesting reading.

Sarah--I think you'd be pleasantly surprised if you saw the book requests at Books for Soldiers (www.booksforsoldiers.com). Plenty of escape fiction, of course, but also plenty of classics, history and military history, books from the various services' reading lists, educational books, and yes, even language-learning materials. You can sign up as a military spouse without going through the minor "vetting" process that is required of us civilians in order to get access to the posted troop requests. I hope you'll take a look.

A long-time volunteer.

The reason for that, in my opinion, is that CA selects its officers from other branches, which means they're already acculturated in the traditional "Army way", which is technocratic and 'lane' oriented, different than the curious, outside the box, learning mindset which should be the hallmark of CA. Your husband is an exception . . . or maybe, he's just a fast reader.

IMO, CA should be filled with enlisted and warrant officers who are acculturated with a CA mindset from the start, better yet, reservists who can mix civilian skills, perspectives, and experience with military.

Eric -- And that's why CA used to be entirely a Reserves MOS. That was the original thinking: take an engineer by day and make him a CA Army engineer one weekend a month. But now they just need too many CA people for the Reserves to carry the weight.

We've also found that CA is a sort of "silver medal" for people who don't make SF selection. They can't go back to their old branch, so they often go CA with the intention of trying for SF again. A few of them are openly dismissive of CA and look at it as a poor-man's SF. They're just killing time until they can try out for SF again. That's really not the right attitude to have.