By: Martin Makaryan
Edited By: Kayla Goldstein
German-American historian Hajo Holborn, who fled the Nazi regime, once said, “History gives answers only to those who know how to ask questions.” This is exactly what selected students set out to do one rainy weekend in October at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, during the SAIS Merrill Center for Strategic Studies’s annual Fall Staff Ride.
As Professor John McLaughlin explains, “this practice dates from an old military tradition of touring battlefields for after action reviews, but adding the element of role-playing in first person to replicate what adversaries actually knew at the time and how they were evaluating it.” What has now become a decades-old SAIS tradition, with its international counterpart in the Spring semester, is a carefully designed learning experience which places students physically in the setting in which history occurred and offers the opportunity to hear multiple views from multiple perspectives on what actually took place and what it meant.
What may have appealed to many as a fun camping trip in the woods of Pennsylvania with SAISers was far more than just any weekend trip. “Not battlefield tourism, but a rich immersive educational experience,” Professor Thomas Mahnken, who has been organizing staff rides at SAIS for the past twenty years, expressed after our trip.
The trip was anything but battlefield tourism—for me and for all my peers who either spent months preparing and organizing behind the scenes or for those who, despite looming midterms, dedicated their entire weekend to an immersive study of General George Washington army’s winter encampment.
Valley Forge is known as the encampment site of the Continental Army during the harsh winter of 1777-1778 when the outcome of America’s quest for independence from Great Britain remained uncertain. While some may recognize the name from their school trips, few actually know the importance of Valley Forge in the grand scheme of the politics, strategy, and the evolution of the Revolutionary War. If nothing else, the SAIS Fall Domestic Staff Ride taught us that the United States might not exist if not for the strategic decisions made and executed in and around Valley Forge.
As an émigré who moved to the United States at a relatively mature age after graduating from high school abroad, I was always keen on exploring the beginning of the American Republic—the birth of a nation that was once a mystery to someone whose French-Armenian bilingual education had turned him into a French history enthusiast. I remember one of the very first books that I read in English, while I was still learning the language after moving to Los Angeles, was Bill O’Reilly’s and Martin Dugard’s Killing England — a fascinating narrative of how America began.
Yet, at Valley Forge, I rediscovered the birth of the nation of which I had recently gained citizenship shortly before joining the staff ride. In a way, it was symbolic (and quite patriotic) to delve into the history of the Revolutionary War immediately after being naturalized as an American. Talk about good timing.
My rediscovery of the Revolutionary War, as the student who was tasked with enacting young Alexander Hamilton, serving as Washington’s aide-de-camp, was not an enlightening experience limited to myself. Dylan Yachysen, a first-year MAIR student focused on Security and Strategy with a regional emphasis on China, was also pleasantly surprised to discover the program was designed to tie the experience of the Continental Army at Valley Forge to the larger theme of the newly emerging American identity and the larger strategic impact the encampment had on the course of history.
What was perhaps most enlightening, and truly allowed students to immerse themselves in that period and convey the significance of this episode from the history of the war, were the character assignments each participant received alongside their research task ahead of the trip. The trip’s itinerary was designed to allow students enacting historical figures, both famous and unknown, to narrate a coherent story that puts Valley Forge into context and helps us better understand how the sequence of actions and decisions led to what we now call history.
Professor Mahnken explained this best. “It should teach us strategic empathy,” he told me. This empathy is needed to overcome the challenge of being, by default, detached from history and often judging leaders and historical figures without the appropriate context in which military and other strategic decisions were made. “Staff rides show that decisions were made by imperfect humans,” according to Professor Mahnken.
The biggest lesson that perhaps we all took away from this incredibly rewarding experience was that nothing in history is inevitable. Determinism and a misguided belief in some providence often leads to making the wrong conclusions, when in reality, nothing is predestined to happen or not happen. We experienced and enacted this firsthand at Valley Forge, uncovering the exact sequence of specific actions and decisions by key figures and trying to answer the never-ending puzzle of the question why?
Another lesson, of course, was that perhaps it is not a good idea to scare everyone at midnight with bear sounds.
SAIS staff rides have been running for decades and have become a beautiful tradition that brings students of all walks of life together in community and purpose. The leadership and organizing team of the Valley Forge edition did an incredible job, despite the stress of safety concerns and the immense responsibility, at ensuring a smooth, fun, and intellectually stimulating experience for all.
Vivian Eng Bendewald, the former President and current Treasurer of the Military Affiliated Students of SAIS (MASOS), who single handedly helped set up a stunning number of tents for the SAIS Army, told me it was very special for her to see everyone around the campfire and the kind of community that this initiative had created. “Navigating and ensuring safety of the number of people we took on the staff ride, which hadn’t been done since Covid, was really different,” she said, discussing the behind-the-scenes work on logistics.
“The unfortunate soldiers were in want of everything; they had neither coats nor hats, nor shirts, nor shoes. Their feet and their legs froze until they were black, and it was often necessary to amputate them,” wrote the famous Marquis de Lafayette, the Frenchman whose contribution to the American Cause has earned him the respect and gratitude of the Nation. His words described the men of the Continental Army who had to live through a harsh winter, with limited to no supplies, and a grim picture of the future.
We, of course, faced slightly better conditions on that rainy Sunday when most of the stands took place and when the trip concluded around a dinner table outside Philadelphia. Fulfilled, intrigued, and exhausted, we returned back to Washington, D.C. with a very different idea of how history happens. It remains to be seen whether we will make good use of it.