Josiah Bunting: he's both a soldier and a scholar. A gentleman and a democrat. An admirer of high achievement and a critic of credentialism. A proponent of boxing and piano playing. Meet a sterling educator. ("Live" with TAE).(Interview)

In 1957, Josiah Bunting enlisted in the Marine Corps. "It was the kind of thing you would do if you had something to prove to yourself," Bunting once remarked. After the proof was in, he enrolled at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, where he eventually graduated third in his class and won a Rhodes scholarship. In 1966, Bunting began a six-year career in the Army, including six months on the Mekong River in Vietnam.

In 1974, Bunting wrote a novel entitled The Lionheads, a paean to the GIs who fought in southeast Asia. "They were utterly American, as American as a tall man with a crew-cut ... casual, loose-jointed, confident," he wrote of his ...