Homage to Stratalonia
SAISers explore the Spanish Civil War
By Alton Buland

The rain in Spain did not fall gently on the plane as it touched down at Bajaras Airport in Madrid. In fact, rain did not fall at all during the SAIS students’ spring break in Spain, validating the trip slogan immortalized on their t-shirts: “Sol y Sombra.” According to the World Tourism Organization, Spain received 58.5 million visitors in 2006, ranking only behind France on the list of top tourist destinations. However, somewhat fewer tourists arrive to study tank warfare, tread battlefields, and debate the merits of anarchist-syndicalism versus Trotskyism (in costume). Few enough that they fit in a single bus driven by a quadrilingual driver named Secondino. This bus, which carried 46 students, professors, and invited guests on the Strategic Studies Departments’ International Staff Ride studying the Spanish Civil War, effectively doubled as a time machine to 1936-1939.

Based on a Prussian military tradition, the Strategic Studies staff rides serve as an “educational technique for studying leadership,” like a business school case study for a historical conflict. Students pose the questions “What happened?” “Why?” “With what result?” Then they provide the answers in the first person, on site, with each student assigned a role of someone in the conflict.

“The student presentations are designed to build a narrative and tie the story together for everyone as you travel. It is not a reenactment,” stresses Sarah Gloo, one of the staff ride’s two “Quartermasters,” or student coordinators. According to Gloo, the staff ride focuses not just on the military and tactical aspects of the conflict, but “covers other issues such as leadership, decision-making, politics, and strategy. The assigned roles included political figures and artists, from Hitler to Picasso.”

Like a diesel-powered Carmen San Diego, the Strat bus covered great time and distance, taking students to 26 different presentation sites, from the hills of Toledo, to the Aragon front, to the shores of the Mediterranean at Barcelona, through the 1930s and into the 21st century. The schedule was punishing; the bus departed each morning by 8 a.m. for a day filled with travel from site to site and presentations. Presentations continued into three hour Spanish dinners ending after midnight, leading into explorations of the more contemporary, bottled aspects of local culture into the wee hours of the morning. Sleep-deprived students helped keep sanguine with sangria.

The trip was run with military efficiency. “Chris [Forster] and Sarah did a phenomenal job to make sure it all ran smoothly,” reported participant Justin Grosnick. “It was so easy to go on this trip because you didn’t have to think of anything except your role. You got on the bus and went to these beautiful places.”

An entire year’s worth of planning, beginning directly after the end of last year’s trip to Sicily, went into the Spanish staff ride, according to Gloo. It involved two scouting trips to Spain on the part of her and Chris Forster, the other Quartermaster. They were assisted by a committee of students formed last September, who helped tackle the logistics of lodging (converted castles and monasteries), food (four-course lunches with endless wine), and travel for four dozen people over the course of four days, as well as developing the research questions that guided the narrative of the trip. The Strategic Studies Department footed much of the bill for the staff ride, with additional funding from generous corporate and alumni donors, including David and Marilyn Fuhrmann, who traveled with the students.

The choice of Spain as a spring break destination may seem somewhat obvious, but the country was also an attractive subject of study for personal and academic reasons for the organizers and participants of the trip. Chris Forster was inspired by his own family history; his mother is Spanish and her family fled the Civil War. Gloo noted that people know too little about the conflict, although it was a precursor to WWII, involving every major international player at the time. The conflict had ideological roots, and its sides were extremely factionalized, suggesting parallels to current struggles.

Justin Grosnick joined the staff ride interested in “studying a non-conventional war, a civil war, and personally because of the big role that religion and the Church played,” Grosnick noted, “I was surprised how complex and ambiguous everything was. I kept changing my mind about what outcome for the war would have been better because it was choosing between two evils. But those people had to make a choice.”

The relevance of the lessons of the Spanish Civil War for today was highlighted by non-student participants, including Professors Thomas Keaney and John McLaughlin of Strategic Studies, as well as Dr. Janine Davidson from the Department of Defense Office of Stability Operations Capabilities and Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks, author of the best-selling Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Ricks presented the role of George Orwell.

Given the brutality and tragedy of its subject, the staff ride’s tone was often somber and its mood discomforting, especially in the ruined shell of a church in the ghost town of Pelchite, or in Franco’s Valley of the Fallen, a cavernous fascist-style mausoleum carved into a mountain, topped with a thousand-foot granite cross, (referred to as the “Bat Cave” by Ricks).

However, students and professors alike found space for humor, both light and dark, in their presentations. Fake accents and mustaches were de rigueur, inspiring what surely were looks of envy from the locals. Students enjoyed a more typical spring break experience their final day, in Barcelona, as Professors Keaney and McLaughlin, true to their Irish heritage, led them in St. Patrick’s Day celebrations.

According to the student assigned the role of Francisco Franco, “Desperate times called for despot measures.”

Alton Buland is a 2nd year MA candidate in Strategic Studies . He participated in the International Staff Ride as a certain unidentified Spanish dictator. He encourages students interested in this unique educational experience to apply to the May 16-17 Spring Staff Ride to Petersburg, Virginia. Email matthewzlatnick@gmail.com for further details. And yes, there will be s’mores.