I stand in front of a group of students in the county where I teach, writing this as they write essays on Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful. They have gone through their writing identifying sentence fragments, determining why they are fragments, and now they are using what they know of language to make their sentences whole. My students are good natured, marking “f” or “s” in the appropriate places. We have just finished Elie Wiesel’s Night, a high school standard. Soon we will read Sherman Alexie, decidedly not standard, but in keeping with our theme of inclusion and exclusion, the powerful and the powerless. We will talk about bias, race, class, and religion in movies and literature. I will hope they can make real connections to life.

When students ask me why we study sentence construction, I tell them sentences are the foundation of our language. When they ask why we study literature, I tell them stories convey what we think is important, and so are the foundation of our civilization. They usually don’t ask again, and I think it is because they don’t know where to go with my answer. Civilizations and those who die to maintain them are abstractions to most of the young people I teach.

On Thanksgiving morning, I was on an airplane flying into West Virginia with a group of young people who looked no older than my students. They were soldiers returning from Iraq. It is easy to tell which populations are expendable, because they are the ones most easily convinced their patriotism should take the form of sacrifice. The poor show their patriotism by dying. Other classes show theirs by using credit cards, thus supporting the economy. West Virginia, like all poor places, produces a percentage of soldiers disproportionate to its population. West Virginia’s soldiers on the airplane were uniformly fit, clean, and polite. A few of them slept, but those with window seats stared outside at thick clouds.

Most of the soldiers were about the age of Erich Remarque’s main character in his WWI novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. He and his fellow soldiers discuss the same sorts of things as my students and I, and I know the conclusions they reach are closer to my students’ reality than I would wish. In one conversation, the soldiers deride the uselessness of conjugating verbs, reciting monarchs, memorizing theorems. They had not always felt that way, but when faced with the gore of the battlefield, classroom subjects became irrelevant.

I think about this as I teach, and as I read the lists of Americans killed in Iraq. Their hometowns are usually places like Wytheville, Virginia; Houma, Louisiana; Lumberton, North Carolina; and Leadville, Colorado. Their places of origin are predictable, as are their ages, their economic status, and the platitudes of our public officials as they attempt to justify the deaths and placate the populations relied upon to produce more expendable youths.

In Remarque’s novel, the young soldiers harangue their complacent and patriotic elders, realizing the depth of the betrayal as the war drags on. The destruction of one generation by another is a theme common in literature because it is factual in history. Everyone knows we send the young to fight and die. And I know I am not the first teacher to look out at a classroom of hopeful, expectant faces and wish I could protect them from the powerful whose decisions so drastically affect their lives. I also know that my opinion concerning the war in the Middle East is as irrelevant to my government as the dreams of Appalachian schoolchildren are to an Iraqi suicide bomber, as sentence fragments are to soldiers in the field. But I keep teaching what I know, hoping my students will find comfort or beauty in what they take from the English classroom, whether they remain here or go away and become soldiers.

One of the soldiers in the crowded airplane last Thanksgiving sat directly in front of me, his forehead pressed to the window, straining to see Chuck Yeager Airport as we descended in the light snow. He looked as if he hadn’t been shaving very long. When I asked him how old he was, he answered, “Eighteen.” I didn’t tell him I’m a high school English teacher, but I did say thank you.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young is a teacher who lives in Cullowhee. She can be reached at playboat9@aol.com.)