What books are required reading for Army officers? When I was commissioned, Anton Myrer’s Once an Eagle was considered professional reading par excellence. This seemed remarkable because, frankly, the book bored me. It seemed poorly written. At best, I thought, it is a thinly veiled morality play in which the two main characters (Sam Damon and Courtney Massengale) represent antagonistic ideals. The good character exemplifies “great leadership,” which is presented as an end-in-itself, and the worst trait among the “bad” character’s many negative traits is that he is a poor commander. The moral to the story? It matters less where you lead your men or what they accomplish than that you lead them well, that you inspire them, that they follow you willingly, joyfully even (even if it is blindly off a cliff).

The esteem with which Elbert Hubbert’s A Message to Garcia was held I found even more baffling. This essay did not seem to rise even to the level of overly simplistic morality play. It is a diatribe, a rant, in which the quality of unquestioning loyalty is exalted above all other qualities, in which the willingness to, yes, jump off that cliff if so ordered is extolled. Hubbert, it seemed, would have made a great Nazi.

Ernest Dunlop Swinton’s The Defense of Duffer’s Drift taught me something about small-unit tactics on an infantry-pure battlefield, very little of value outside that laser focus. Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angelswas an enjoyable read, but it, too, seemed to me like a play—in this case, one in which larger-than-life union and confederate generals say larger-than-life things and in which all the real muck and horror of war take place somewhere off-stage.

I could go on in this vein, but it is best I move to the heart of the matter: as a profession, the U.S. Army is in desperate need of better written and more useful “classics.” Recently, I came across one little-known book that could help fill this need. Charles Krohn’s The Lost Batta