When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s, as the Vietnamconflict was escalating, I took Stanley Hoffmann's mesmeriz-ing course, "Causes of War." I thought back to this class as Iread Cynthia Enloe's book, which deserves all the superla-tives it has accrued. The experience of reading now andremembering back left me wondering: Without Enloe toconsult (her first book on militarism and gender came out inthe early 1980s), what were we missing in Hoffmann's class?The answer, I think, is this: We could understand well enoughthe contending theories about why nations go to war; but inthe absence of Enloe, we were less able to ask how militariescould manage such massive mobilizations that required theoften calamitous sacrifice of precious lives even for warswhose purposes seemed remote or unconvincing.