In the Fall of 2010, Brigadier General, Xavier Holsterman, Army, Retired, age 93, taught a class entitled, The Mind of War, at The Atlantic Military Institute, a military school located on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. Once a week, for one semester, inside the small auditorium of Washington Hall, The General stood alone on a stage. He looked out at an assembly of 237 cadets seated before him, their desks rising in stair-stepping rows, sloping higher-and-higher toward the exits at the back of the large room.
The students were the scholastic equivalents of high school sophomores, they were in their first year at The Academy, and all held the academy’s military rank of Private.
The Mind of War was an elective course, meaning it was not required for graduation, and not every first year student chose to take it. Roughly, seventeen percent of the first year Privates were enrolled in The Mind of War, and as the semester progressed, the class’s workload and subject material weighed heavily on them. Some wished they had enrolled in a less time consuming elective. Others came to believe that The Mind of War was the most important course they had ever taken.
The class consisted of one three-hour period, once a week, every Friday morning. The General gave seventeen lectures during the semester. These lectures were supplemented with required readings, essay assignments, midterms, and a final exam. All assignments were designed by The General himself. No multiple choice questions were ever given. No short answers were ever accepted. It was The General’s desire to increase the awareness and understanding of the subject material, (that subject being Psychological Warfare) and due to this, the General felt multiple-choice questions and simple two-to-three sentence answers were inappropriate. “Life is complicated, Cadets,” The General once stated during a lecture. “And rote memorization and regurgitation of facts is the simpleton’s path to education.”
The General had designed his course not as one with straightforward objectives or goals to meet throughout the semester. He had designed it as a mental voyage. The General continually pushed his students to think deeply, critically reason, and hopefully, increase their abilities of analytical judgement and personal illumination. “Getting people to all think the same thing is easy,” The General once mused. “Getting people to think for themselves is exceptionally difficult.”
Unlike most instructors at The Academy, The General was not a teacher. He possessed no teaching degree, license or training. He was only granted his position (without pay) after a very large, anonymous donation found its way into The Academy’s coffers. The General did, however, possess multiple degrees from prestigious universities. He had Ph.D.’s in the fields of Psychology and Biochemistry, a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering, and a Medical Doctorate specializing in Psychopharmacology. The General had also been a guest speaker, multiple times, at various war colleges.
For most of The General’s life, he had practiced what he taught. As a young and middle-aged man, he had excelled within the military intelligence community, performing research-and-development on classified projects, and toward the end of his career, he had worked in the field as a psy-op commander, designing, orchestrating and implementing psychological operations on foreign soil.
With concern for his course, The Mind of War, The General was considered by many military leaders to be the western world’s premier expert in the field of Psychological Warfare. And perhaps it was because of this, this high regard and esteem, which explain the choices in subject material The General lectured on, subjects most would deem unsuitable for high school children. It is also possible The General’s intentions were clandestine themselves, and the class may have been its own psychological operation. No one knows… No one knows why a retired military genius in his twilight years chose to teach a company sized group of high schoolers about psychological warfare… But one thing is certain. In his course, The Mind of War, The General did not hold back.