Classic lit for soldiers, football players and journalists

British boys schools and American military academies assign Homer as must-reading for plebs.
Soft young minds need the bloody joint-crunching of the Trojan War to juice up the impulse to wage war for queen and country or for flag and country.
Classical literature stands as the best military field manual ever written. How violent is the species human. Always has been.
Hand-to-hand combat starts in the mind that transforms what otherwise would be the anti-romantic, organized maiming of enemies into socially acceptable pretense of civility.
War is what Carl von Clausewitz called diplomacy by other means. How politically correct-sounding.
The NFL is gladiator society that will do until we next demonize another foreign enemy and set upon him with spear or pike or bayonet.
We have to be taught to hate, says a line in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific.
Nah.
We have to be taught to transform hatred into battle and to settle between wars for their somewhat milder alternative, American football.
All the tactics and strategy and attempts to intellectualize the game -- or the battlefield -- cover up the effort to hurt the other guy before he can hurt you.
So I'd simply give freshmen and cadets chapter one of The Blind Side by narrative journalist Michael Lewis.
Journalists should read the passage to see the less banal side of sports and to envy the style of the writer. His timing and controlled release of information condenses the violence of pay-for-view bone-breaking into 12 white-knuckle pages.
They begin: "From the snap of the ball to the snap of of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five."
And the opening is prelude only -- a back story of how the left tackle position evolved to fend off the  bonecrusher Lawrence Taylor and his imitators coming after quarterbacks. By extension the account  explains how Michael Oher rose from impoverished obscurity to protect the blind side of his own Achilles every Sunday.
Everyone knows the book, because they saw Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock in the soft and sweet movie.
The flick is good. But the more serious, blood-spurting book is great narrative journalism (W. W. Norton & Co., 2009, ppb., 339 pages, $13.95), the kind that explains what you didn't know enough to ask about.
Oh, the ancient Homer is stick-to-the-ribs more filling as a writer.
But for bustin' up those ribs and teaching soldiers to soldier and players to play and writers to narrate, Michael Lewis produces a modern classic in war, uh, ahem, sports journalism