Math revisited!
PETER GRAHAM ’02
P
eter Graham’02 had a rude reawakening when he began his Army training as a field artillery officer. “I thought I’d left my Cistercian math classes behind me, but at the artillery schoolhouse, they stuck a box of slide rulers in my hand and said: you’ll need these,” he recalled. “I quickly realized that I was well served by the critical thinking and problemsolving skills we’d been taught. Rote memorization and just repeating facts weren’t as important as thinking through second and third order effects. We were exposed to this in a lot of our classes at Cistercian.” Peter was a bit of a late bloomer when it came to his interest in the miliary. He’d gone off to college at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, but it wasn’t until the end of his sophomore year that he met several fellow students who were in the ROTC program. “That kind of demystified the military for me,” he said. “I got into ROTC late in my sophomore year of college.” During the summer before his senior year, he attended Army Airborne School at Fort Benning, GA, and a providential encounter with another Cistercian alum added to his comfort level with the military. “I found out that Nathan Porter ’95 was stationed there with the 3rd Ranger Battalion,” Graham said. “He picked me up one weekend, showed me around and was a huge help. He was really motivating for me. It was my first time on an army post, and Nathan was in one of the Army’s
elite units. I really appreciated the Cistercian connection. It helped me get through Airborne school.” After graduating from Villanova and being commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant, Peter did his artillery officer training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma before being stationed in Texas at Fort Hood. “I was hoping for Germany or Italy, but no such luck. I ended up right back in Texas,” he said.
His time in Texas didn’t last long. In May of 2008, he and his 40-man platoon were deployed to Iraq. “The difference in culture was really stark,” Graham said. “We were working with school teachers and with people trying to provide clean water. At one point, one of the local town council members said that all our plans for a new canal were great, but if we weren’t going to let it rain, it wouldn’t matter. It just shocked me how different perceptions were.
They thought that as a 24-yearold, I somehow had control over the weather. Under Saddam, there was a perception of total government control, and folks in government often waited until someone told them what to do. It was foreign to us, since initiative and independent thinking were so important to us in the Army.” After leaving active service in 2010, he entered the Army reserves and was deployed again in 2014 to Afghanistan, where he worked as an information operations officer, an office job—mostly. “I was with the Joint Task Force in a job that focused on developing ways to engage with the local population,” he said. “I was in the Kunar and Nuristan districts, which were very mountainous. It was amazing how different the culture was from one valley to the next in that area, and it forced us to find unique ways to engage with folks in each valley. It really tested our ability to organize massive amounts of information, write tailored content, and at times think outside the box.” Another skill Graham honed at Cistercian and found useful in the Army was the ability to write clear and concise prose. “Being able to write well was surprisingly important. In the Army, they say: be brief; be brilliant; be gone. That means don’t belabor the point. Get to the bottom line and state your case clearly. Some of the guys had trouble with this, but I bought into it and felt giving clear and concise briefings became a strength.” •
Bob Greenfield is the father of Rob ’92 and Michael ’99, grandfather of Joseph Hess ’22, and spouse of Jackie Greenfield, Cistercian English teacher for 24 years until her retirement in 2017. Continuum FALL 2024 49