Yet Samet’s account of the uses of literature in an officer’s education takes on a decidedly eighteenth-century character, recalling how certain defenders of the novel, among other genres, argued it was useful tool for the cultivation of readers’ moral sensibilities, massaging our sentimental capacities into such a state where we would more easily identify with the lowly, the alien, and, in this case, the enemy. Or at least the civilian populations, often indistinguishable from America’s various opponents, in counterinsurgency warfare.