When President George H. W. Bush ordered the first US combat troops to the Middle East in August 1990 as part of Operation Desert Shield, newspaper photographers recorded the moment. An AP photographer caught the most memorable image: a picture of Corporal David Ellis of Chicago reading The Red Badge of Courage as he awaited a transport ship in Morehead City, North Carolina, the port of embarkation for the Second Division of the US Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune.

The photograph presents an image of a marine who has never been to war learning what it might be like by reading The Red Badge of Courage. The widely reprinted image startled me when I first saw it in 1990. It seems less startling now, that is, now that I have been studying the cultural history of The Red Badge of Courage and know that American service members have been reading it before entering combat ever since the Spanish-American War.

General Alfred M. Gray, Jr., the Marine Corps Commandant, would not have been startled by the image in 1990, either. The previous year Gray had instituted the Marine Corps Professional Reading Program. “I firmly believe that professional reading is essential to the professional growth of our leaders,” Gray said. “Marines fight better when they fight smarter. Systematic and progressive professional reading contributes directly to that goal.” Gray's list of required reading arranges book titles according to military grade from corporal to colonel. As part of the ambitious program, Gray included much more than military manuals and leadership handbooks. He also listed books about logistics and tactics, military biographies, histories of famous battles and war novels.

Corporal Ellis was reading ahead. Killer Angels, Michael Shaara's Civil War novel, was on the corporal's list. The Red Badge of Courage does not appear until gunnery sergeant. A headnote to the gunnery sergeant section provides the following instructions: “Read a minimum of two books (four ideally) annually, chosen either by the individual or the unit commander, from the following list” (“Program” 20). Besides The Red Badge of Courage, gunnery sergeants might have also read John A. Lejeune's Reminiscences of a Marine, the autobiography of a former commandant, one who had shaped the character of the modern Marine.

On 19 June 1947 Studio One, a CBS radio anthology series, debuted “The Red Badge of Courage,” a one-hour dramatization. Studio One was created by Fletcher Markle, who also directed and introduced the Crane adaptation. Imagine the sound of Markle's voice as listeners heard it coming through their crackly AM radios:

Markle's words emphasize the relevance of Crane's novel to the war that had recently ended. After announcing the cast, he ends his introduction by drawing a parallel between the protagonist of Crane's novel and the World War II soldier. Markle expresses “admiration for the Henry Flemings of our more recent yesterdays.”

The changes made to Crane's story for Studio One are not dissimilar to the changes Irving Bacheller had made when he adapted Red Badge for newspaper serialization. The producers at CBS shortened the story to emphasize its action over its contemplative nature. They also softened Crane's irony and made Henry's character more likeable. In the Studio One version Henry no longer flees from the tattered man. Instead, the two say good-bye amicably. And Henry does not feel any sort of unwarranted superiority over Wilson when they are reunited after their first battle. In Crane's Red Badge a schoolgirl makes fun of Henry after he joins the army. The Studio One “Red Badge” keeps her in the story but adds another female character, Jessie, who admires Henry for enlisting. Jessie's voice returns in Henry's memory directly before the last sentence of the adaptation: the radio equivalent of the Hollywood clinch.

Criticism of The Red Badge of Courage first came in the form of personal advice. Stephen Crane started writing the novel in June 1893 while living in New York. Later that month he left Manhattan for Lake View, a tiny suburb south of Paterson, New Jersey, where he moved into the garret of his brother Edmund's home. Edmund remembered Stephen working on Red Badge all summer. Once the family retired for the evening Stephen would ascend to the garret and write into the small hours. Once his war novel started taking shape, he would read chapters to Edmund to get his advice.

Stephen was not necessarily looking for a detailed critique: he just wanted to know whether Edmund liked the story. He did. As Stephen read the draft aloud, his brother occasionally suggested changes. Edmund recalled: “When, listening to the reading of the story, I ventured to suggest the substitution of a word that would give the meaning intended better than the word he used, he would consider the matter and then decide, oftener against than for the suggestion. He had the confidence of a genius” (13).

Stephen Crane was born on 1 November 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, which, as Upton Sinclair quipped, “goes to prove that a genius may spring up anywhere in the world” (346). Crane was only twentyone when he began Red Badge. Despite his youth, Red Badge was not his first book. Earlier in 1893 he had published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York). But perhaps “published” is not quite the right word. Crane had been unable to find a publisher for the daring story of Maggie Johnson. Though his eponymous heroine is the most memorable prostitute in American literature, her story was far too edgy for mainstream publishers in the late nineteenth century, a time when writers were willing to write what publishers were unwilling to publish. Crane exhausted a small inheritance to self-publish Maggie. It sold few copies.

Undaunted, Crane began Red Badge three months after Maggie appeared. He sought the advice of others throughout its composition. Crane lived in Lake View until September, when he moved back to New York, sharing a studio in the old Art Students League building on East 23d Street with three artist friends.

Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. Moore, the 1st Battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) was dropped into landing zone X-Ray, a clearing in Ia Drang Valley on 14 November 1965. Surrounded by thousands of regulars from the People's Army of Vietnam, the American troops faced a formidable enemy. Moore's men acquitted themselves admirably, but with seventy-nine dead the battalion suffered far too many casualties for what it gained. Three days later a sister battalion fared worse, with over two hundred men killed in action.

The Battle of Ia Drang Valley tested a new military strategy: airmobility. The first campaign in which American forces engaged large-scale North Vietnamese regular units, it was also the bloodiest campaign since Lyndon Johnson had dispatched ground troops to Vietnam. Ia Drang sent an ominous message to the American people, letting them know that only an open-ended, massive commitment of American troops and resources could shift the war in favor of the United States.

Newsweek reported the battle in a feature story, “Fury at Ia Drang.” A photograph depicting three wounded men from the 1st Cavalry helping one another heads the article. It bears the caption: “Red Badge of Courage.” Reporting the first major battle of the Vietnam War, Newsweek drew a parallel with Crane's novel, still a benchmark for men at war. Many of the young men who fought at Ia Drang were seeing combat for the first time, and, like Henry Fleming, they, too, wondered how they would react in combat.

The Newsweek reporter was not the only one to recognize the parallel between Ia Drang and Crane's portrayal of Chancellorsville in Red Badge. The same week the news magazines reported Ia Drang to the American people, KXKX-FM, the CBS radio affiliate in Oakland, California broadcast Edmond O’Brien's dramatic reading of The Red Badge of Courage on its regular program, The Spoken Word. O’Brien had recorded his abridged reading in 1957, the same year another prominent Hollywood actor, Robert Ryan, had recorded an unabridged reading of Red Badge. The person in charge of programming at the Oakland radio station recognized the newfound relevance of Red Badge after Ia Drang and the suitability of O’Brien's recording for a one-hour program (“Radio Highlights”).

Four months before the United States declared war on Germany, H. E. Dounce published a critical essay in the New York Evening Sun titled “Stephen Crane as a Craftsman.” Dounce situates Crane within the history of American literature, finding him “our most original genius since Poe, with the exception of Frank Norris.” Discussing how Crane's writing looked forward to modernism, Dounce seems more intrigued with his poetry than his prose. Crane “anticipated most of the things which the more attractive wing of the Free Verse army, Miss Amy Lowell's wing, is striving after.” Red Badge, too, foreshadowed modernism, being written in a manner akin to what André Breton would call automatic writing. Dounce continues: “The soldiers in The Red Badge are multiplications of one animate lay figure—yclept the youth, and the youth is Crane, under an auto-hypnosis and with the realities changed, going through the sensations of a battle like Bull Run.”

Dounce's discriminating essay seems out of place in the pages of an evening paper. “Stephen Crane as a Craftsman” would be more appropriate for a scholarly journal sponsored by a college English department and published by a university press. But when it appeared in January 1917, there were virtually no journals that welcomed articles like it. Even after the Great War such journals were slow in coming, but newspapers and magazines occasionally published articles about Crane.

In 1919 Harriet Monroe wrote a Crane essay for Poetry, the magazine she had founded as a forum for modernist verse. Though the similarities between his verse and Imagism gave her an excuse to discuss Crane, Monroe preferred his fiction. She liked Maggie best but thought Red Badge possessed “the same vividness of realistic detail artistically concentrated upon the presentation of a character and a situation.” Red Badge reminded her of Conrad's Typhoon, especially in its “penetrating descriptive power, presenting intensively a single cataclysmic experience of a human soul struggling against sublime obstacles” (148–49).

None of the Red Badge articles that appeared the first few years after the Great War are more sophisticated than the one Herbert Read wrote in 1921 as an installment of “Readers and Writers,” his regular literary column in New Age. Inspired by a review of Georg Lukács's Die Theorie des Romans, Read used Lukács's classification of the novel as a subset of die grosse Epik—great epic writing—to interpret Moby-Dick.

In 1939, the year both France and Great Britain declared war on Germany, Les Libertés Françaises, a Paris publisher, reissued the French translation of The Red Badge of Courage that Francis Viélé- Griffin and Henry-D. Davray had first released in 1911. A similar phenomenon occurred in Britain. In 1939 Collins published a new edition of Red Badge as part of its series of handsomely printed, small-format classics. The Collins Red Badge remained in print during the war. It was the kind of book British parents could buy for sons headed to the front lines. My copy, which I bought at a secondhand bookshop in Bristol, contains the following presentation inscription: “To Christopher from Mummie, 1943.”

The Collins Red Badge appeared with an introduction by Frederick Brereton, a decorated World War I veteran who established his literary reputation as the author of war stories for boys. Brereton emphasizes Crane's originality: “Never before in fiction had the heart of a soldier been laid bare with such consummate skill and disconcerting honesty. Gone for ever with the publication of Stephen Crane's book was the illusion of the soldier as a romantic figure” (ix). Both the Collins and the Libertés Françaises editions indicate that what had happened during World War I was happening again during World War II. The outbreak of war created a new demand for books about war in general and for The Red Badge of Courage in particular.

Writing in 1940, D. R. Lock, a Welsh contributor to Catholic World who went by the mellifluous pen name Petronius Applejoy, stressed the newfound relevance of Red Badge. Lock ends his essay with the following paragraph:

Aging is associated with cognitive decline. The extant literature suggests that exercise positively impacts multiple cognitive domains or at least attenuates the rate of decline among nondemented older adults, but less is known about the broader cognitive impact of daily physical activity (that may or may not fall under the definition of exercise). Evolving technologies have ushered a new wave of research that objectively measures physical activity, providing a metric that is more precise and avoids some of the limitations of self-report data. In this chapter, we briefly review studies examining the relationship between objectively measured physical activity and cognition among older adults. We highlight the current state of the literature on aging, cognition, and wearable technologies that objectively assess physical activity. Our review revealed several cross-sectional studies that show a significant and positive association between overall and specific intensities of physical activity and cognition among older adults. Longitudinal studies indicated that physical activity positively impacts cognitive performance and thus support the notion that physical activity may protect against age-related cognitive decline. Moreover, the extant literature suggests that physical activity may preferentially benefit executive function, processing speed, and episodic memory. Further research on the objective assessment of physical activity and cognition will help identify the precise amount and intensity of daily physical activity that confers optimal cognitive benefits and may inform activity prescriptions for optimal cognitive aging.

Clinical psychological science is improved when it seeks to understand not only whether an effect exists but also how that effect operates and its boundary conditions. Mediation and moderation analysis are widely used in clinical psychological research to explore and test hypotheses about the mechanisms by which causal effects operate and the contingencies of those effects. Their integration as conditional process analysis allows for the examination of the contingencies of those mechanisms – for whom or in what circumstances a particular mechanism is in operation or whether it is strong as opposed to weak. This chapter reviews the fundamentals of mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis using ordinary least squares regression, commenting along the way on good practice as well as various misunderstandings in circulation. It illustrates the application of these fundamentals and their implementation using the PROCESS macro for SPSS and SAS.