Harvard professor deploys to Afghanistan
By Fisnik Abrashi - The Associated Press
Posted : Sunday Jun 21, 2009 8:38:24 EDT
FORWARD OPERATING BASE AIRBORNE, Afghanistan — Last year, Kit Parker was a Harvard professor. Today, he is a U.S. Army major in Afghanistan.
Parker has spent his career juggling two unlikely professions: Teaching and fighting. He returned in December to Afghanistan, where he has been involved in firefights and roadside bomb attacks on his convoys.
His unusual career path has put the 43-year-old in what he calls “the two extremes of human condition.”
“You have Afghanistan, where you have ... 90 percent illiteracy, people living in mud huts, roughly the 12th century,” says Parker, a towering man with a shaved head, darting blue eyes, a southern drawl and an apparently strong command of just about any subject he talks about. “And then you got people at Harvard, where supposedly we are all literate and have all kinds of education available to us. How more different can these two environments be?”
And yet, he says, one thing is the same — the relentless pace of the work. Nothing prepared him better for Harvard than his first deployment.
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http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/06/ap_army_professor_afghanistan_062109/
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