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There are two key goals we seek to achieve through the completion of this program. The primary goal is to serve veterans through discussions of key humanities texts in genocide studies. The second goal is to bridge the ROTC and veteran communities and help prepare the next generation of military officers. There are few places where veterans can discuss the history of the US military’s relationship with genocide and help put their experience into a framework for understanding the future role of the US military in genocide prevention. To provide such a framework, this project will provide training and discussion opportunities on different cases of genocide which have been directly influenced by the US military. We will look at four different themes in relation to four different case studies:

1. US military perpetrating genocide (specifically against the Seminole in Florida);
2. US military liberating genocide (Holocaust, specifically the liberation of camps);
3. US military witnessing genocide (specifically the Yazidis and others fighting ISIS);
4. US military preventing genocide (the future of Afghanistan).

We understand the humanities as key to fostering an environment free from judgement, blame, or self-recrimination. We also understand that while it is key for both our leaders and our discussion participants to understand facts about the military’s involvement in these cases, using humanities helps negotiate the often under-acknowledged emotions of fear, rage, sorrow, pain, and sometimes other and even opposite emotions such as love, hope, and joy present within the human landscape of genocidal aggression.

We believe that a program of this nature firstly identifies a narrative and on-going relationship between the US military and the processes and consequences of genocidal violence. Considering especially the increasing challenges posed by climate change, the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe, and increased tensions in the South China Sea, providing a space for veterans to explore this narrative will also help prepare them to understand future conflicts. However, this project goes beyond the creation of a discussion space for veterans. As discussed further below, Embry-Riddle (ERAU) has a large veteran community. ERAU also hosts one of the largest ROTC programs in the state of Florida consisting of students at three universities in Volusia County. However, there are few opportunities for these two communities to learn from each other. We believe providing an opportunity to bridge these communities will inevitably result in a stronger, more capable ROTC cadre and will provide leadership opportunities within our veteran population, adding to their skillset and knowledge transfer capabilities. The second goal of this project is to support a series of opportunities for these two communities to come together, using humanities sources as a framework for discussion. We will achieve this through the training of eight veteran discussion leaders, who will go on to lead a course under the direction of faculty offered in Fall 2023, US Military and Genocide, open to all students but targeting those in ROTC and, in Spring 2024, a series of three public discussions held at participating universities.

We believe the creation of a university course and a public discussion series on the US Military and Genocide will bring ROTC and veteran students together through deepening their understanding of the contribution of the humanities to war studies; we hope to use the community of studentship to help bridge the divide between different military “generations”. This would then continue into the facilitation of public discussions that will allow for the leadership skills gained by veterans in the classroom to be demonstrated on a larger scale and to a wider audience. Finally, we believe that both the course and discussion series will contribute to the repositioning of humanities resources into core teaching in genocide studies. While widely regarded as critical to reconstruction and reconciliation (Skavdahl 2020), humanities resources such as music and poetry are largely under-used in syllabi on genocide courses, particularly in cases other than the Holocaust (Schneider 2014). We believe exposing veterans and ROTC students to humanities sources provides a deeper understanding of mass violence than an historical study alone can convey. In genocide studies, it is easy to get lost in the numbers; 1 million dead, 500,000 dead, 6 million Jews, 13 million victims – these numbers are hard for the mind to understand and often mask the impact of each individual loss. Music, poetry, art, and oral history are not only at the center of the humanities but are at the heart of humanity; they give voice to the cultural structure of identity. Genocide is legally defined as the intentional destruction "in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The destruction of culturally defined humanities artifacts are integral to the destruction of that group identity. By highlighting the value of these works in understanding the US Military’s relationship with genocide, we hope to reposition the value of the individual and to give our veterans and rising military leaders a chance to better understand their place within this relationship.