THIS IS A VERY INTERESTING PLACE TO WORK. TWO days after the September attacks, a group of us were standing in the hallway, listening while one of the editors explained, at length and with considerable passion, her view that President Bush could have behaved in a more statesmanlike manner during the hours after the assault. We were just outside the office of another editor, a notably quiet and hardworking fellow who, a few minutes into the diatribe, slammed shut his door with such violence that the in-boxes on the filing cabinets jumped and rattled.

He never said a word about this wholly uncharacteristic gesture but the following Monday put on my desk a photocopy of a page from Poltroons and Patriots, Glenn Tucker’s 1954 history of the War of 1812. He’d marked a passage telling of an incident on a Hudson River steamboat that Tucker felt indicated an important shift in the national mood. Washington Irving was aboard, and “learned from passengers who boarded the vessel at Poughkeepsie that the British Army had captured Washington and burned the public buildings. A man was lolling in the dark on one of the settees of the boat. Overhearing the news, he remarked rather rudely, ‘Well, I wonder what Jimmie Madison will say now?’ Irving, suddenly enraged, took a quick swing at the scoffer, caught him a glancing blow, and then gave him a lesson in the rudiments of patriotism:

“’Sir, do you seize on such a disaster only for a sneer? Let me tell you, it is not now a question about Jimmie Madison or Johnny Armstrong. The pride and honor of this nation are wounded. The country is insulted and disgraced by this barbarous success, and every loyal citizen should feel the ignominy and be eager to avenge it.’”

Remember that I was reading this at a time when the annihilating power of this recent barbarous success seemed to some to have seared away history altogether. For a while people were saying that there were no useful historical precedents, and Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times that the calamity did have its benefit: It would liberate the American citizenry from its “fetishization” of World War II.

Naturally, it is in the nature of our job to hang on to history, and we were glad to see that before long the general tenor had shifted and the media were drawing steadily on the past, examining events ranging from Pearl Harbor to the Crusades (and even the War of 1812, if not the young Washington Irving). Both these responses—fleeing the past, then pursuing it—make perfect emotional sense. The present is a very tough bully; but history helps us escape his torments.

Two stories in this issue grow directly out of current troubles, and both of them are reassuring. Dennis Giangreco’s study of Special Forces not only clarifies the role these littleunderstood soldiers play but suggests, at a time when we