Battle Rhythm

“In war, the best strategy is always to be very strong, first in general and then at the decisive point.” – Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz.

I need to develop a “battle rhythm” or this project will overwhelm me. I learned the term at the U.S. Army War College during my two years there as a visiting professor. Essentially it means a sustainable routine.

The first priority is self-care. I need spiritual support and friends to whom I can reach out. Re the former, two are in place, one of whom was a close friend of mine in high school, the other a senior-level chaplain in the U.S. Army. Friends include three classmates from my 1977 high school graduation class.

I need to make time to read the Bible each day, do a devotional, and pray. I also need to be sure to take a walk or do some other kind of exercise on a daily basis. I need to eat right.

The second priority is to be consistent in my work on this project but to limit the time spent on it to two hours 5-6 days per week—both to give me time to attend to other projects and also to protect myself from psychological harm. This work is extraordinarily hard on me emotionally.

The third priority is to put regular entries online—each day if possible, but at least several times a week. Most of these entries will be short essays of 500-1,000 words, and most of them will work as a way to generate the book manuscript in a modular way, so that as I construct the final draft I can move them around as best suits the manuscript’s organization.

Insofar as possible I want to use a “show, don’t tell” narrative approach informed by the works of Civil War popular historians Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton. I have already written magazine columns on Foote and Catton. There are two biographies of Foote, two volumes of literary criticism, and a book containing his correspondence with novelist Walker Percy, much of it consisting of commentary on the creation of “The Civil War: A Narrative” (3 vols., 1954-1975).

There is no biography of Catton but there are several article-length appreciations; a few essays that Catton wrote on the craft of narrative history; and a memoir, “Waiting for the Morning Train: An American Boyhood” (1972). Most importantly, I studied the works of Catton closely during my teenage years learning the writer’s craft, so I know his style very closely; and more recently I have studied the way he structures his books—it’s no accident that he is a superb story-teller (as well as highly insightful about the war).

The fourth priority is to get the project organized in terms of building an archive, I suppose you’d call it, of all the relevant material, of which there is one hell of a lot: four journals (at least) and three notebooks focusing on poetry, stories, copied poems, etc., from the relevant period; also about 200 pages of typed, single-spaced reflective essays and journal entries (mostly from 1986 and 1997). I can only expend so much time on it, but I need to build it into something reasonably complete and to a standard similar to that of, say, the Library of Congress. Either you do this thing properly or you don’t.

The final priority is actual research and writing, which of course will eventually replace the fourth priority. I’ll start with two general works on suicide: A. Alvarez, “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide” (1971), a classic in the field; and “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide,” by Kay Redfield Jamison (1999). Alvarez (1929-2019) was a literary figure—a poet, mostly. Jamison (1946- ) is a clinical psychologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She co-wrote the standard textbook on bipolar disorder (which I own), and has bipolar disorder herself. I have read her memoir, “An Unquiet Mind” (1995). She’s quite a strong writer. Once I have learned my way around the field of suicidology I’ll begin to contact real experts on the subject.