Ryan Kort found Dune in a bookshop near Fort Riley, Kansas, just before his 2003 deployment to Iraq. The black cover of the book, which featured an image of a desert landscape and silhouettes of two figures in robes walking through the sand, intrigued the 23-year-old second lieutenant. It was compact and small despite its 800-plus pages. He bought it and took it to the Gulf. The only novel was also in his bag, along with his Army manuals.
Kort read the book in his downtime during the following weeks as he led his 15-man platoon and four tanks through Kuwaiti desert and then when they moved into an abandoned, powerless building in Baghdad. It was the story of a young man who moves from a green planet to find a far more dangerous, arid planet called Arrakis. This deserted planet holds a crucial resource for all the universe's great powers. He also notes that when people suggested this was a war for oil, he would roll his eyes at them. That is something I don't mind anymore.
He recalls that the parallels felt uncanny. He says that he felt a connection with Dune as the call to prayer rose around him in that darkened building in Iraq's capital. The book was almost like a glimpse into a bigger story than the one he was a part of. He says that something in the book clicked. It went beyond the moment I was in.
Kort would soon become a Dune enthusiast, rereading every book in Frank Herbert's six-book series. It was years later that Kort began to notice deeper similarities after his second deployment to Iraq, a much more difficult tour of duty, in which his troops were repeatedly struck by roadside bombs.
Dune's native Fremen are the ones whose insurgent, guerrilla strategies ultimately triumph. These are not the Atreides heroes, Harkonnen villains or galactic emperor with his Spartan Sardaukar soldiers. No matter what analogy you use for the United States, or whether the Fremen included in that analogy refer to Afghanistani or Iraqi, the insurgents can outmatch or outlast any superpower.
It's obvious that the lessons are evident when you look at it. It is not enough to have a lot of technology. According to Kort, who is a strategist and policy officer in the Army's strategic planning and policy department, the military power of a nation can sometimes not secure your goals. There are many human imperfections, and people have both honor and interests. Sometimes, the adversary will pay more.
The success of Dune's ecological, psychological, or spiritual themes has been credited to Herbert in 1965. Herbert's own commentary on the book focused on its environmental messages. He later became an ecological guru and turned his Washington home, called Xanadu into a DIY energy experiment.
It was hard to read Dune after half a century, when many Herberts psychological and environmental ideas have been absorbed into mainstream culture or become outdated. This happened in the aftermath of the 20-year-long war in Afghanistan. The books' focus on human conflict is striking. A complex, detailed world where factions are constantly vying to gain power and advantage through every means possible. It is Herberts vision of this future that is revered by a select class of sci-fi-reading geeks in the military intelligence community and war nerds, who view the book as an amazingly prescient lens for understanding conflicts on a global level.
