Post-Laboy Day Reading Acquired

My dissertation co-advisors encouraged me to take several days off from academic activities to recharge after the grueling comprehensive exam process - 450 books in about a year, and, yes, I read the vast majority of them (over 80%).  I'm not good at skimming and comprehending, so when I read, I tend to read every single word, and I take notes while reading things that I'm going to have to refer to later.  If I hadn't done that, comps would have been impossible.  As it is, I'm not great at historiography - Unless we're talking works that I've read several times, or are really important to what I'm doing, I can usually remember the arguments made, but not always who it was that made them.

Anyway, I need to hit the ground running on the dissertation on either Sept 3rd (Labor Day) or September 4th.  My immediate tasks are to read Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, Omer Bartov's Hitler's Army, and E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed, all of which discuss regular guys committing atrocities, either when ordered or just of their own accord, during their respective wars.  Beyond these, microhistories of German soldiers from World War II might provide some good ideas of how soldiers who committed atrocities (and those who didn't) rationalized their actions.

The second step will be to identify a unit or incident to focus my analysis on.  I think I'm going to start with Son My to see what has already been written about that incident and what information is available, but I'll also be looking at the available documents from the papers of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group.  A fair amount of the files still need to be sanitized, but there are several thousand pages available.  NARA has also released case summaries for 246 cases that will help narrow my search down.  I also need to ask the staff at NARA for a listing of the status of the case filed to see what is sanitized, what is available in full, and what items are still unprocessed so I can see what my options are.

ABD

So, I finally passed Ph.D comprehensive exams.  Unfortunately, while that was a grueling ordeal, which required reading books I would ordinarily have ignored, that does not mean I have a Ph.D yet.  This fun process, which feels as much like academic hazing as our foreign language requirements, is really just the qualifying round.  Research, writing, and dissertation defense come next.  In effect, what I've gone through might be looked at as the academic version of olympic qualifying - it just gives you the right to compete at the top level of the sport.

Next step? I'm taking a week off from serious academic stuff to relax and recharge (and respond to my online students in their first week of classes).  Then I'll figure out how to narrow my dissertation research down to something manageable - I've already decided to drop the Marine Corps from my analysis of atrocities in Vietnam due to the problems in getting sources about the Marine's experience (read Nick Turse's very long dissertation to see the depth of those problems, but basically the Corps just didn't keep good systematic records about potential war crimes).  The issue that I'm facing is that there are sooo many pages of documents, sooo many oral histories to navigate through, sooo many memoirs to read, that its just unmanageable in the time frame I have left to research and write.  That means I need to narrow things down to a set of events or a units to really focus on.

I really don't want to write yet another book about My Lai.  That's a hornet's nest that I just don't want to kick.  The other moderately well-known atrocity is Son My.  I'll have to ponder that one a bit and see what's already out there on it.  As an event, it does have the advantage of being specifically addressed by the documents in the Col. Tufts archive up at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  That's an entry point, if nothing else.

So, what's the weather like in Ann Arbor during the month of October?