> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.merionwest.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # A Most Unusual Man: Joseph T. Cox, 1946-2026 - URL: https://www.merionwest.com/a-most-unusual-man-joseph-t-cox-1946-2026/ - Published: 2026-10-11T02:28:33.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-11T04:08:09.000Z - Description: W. D. Ehrhart remembers Joseph T. Cox, the Army colonel, poet, and headmaster of The Haverford School whose friendship restored his teaching career and transformed the last three decades of his life. - Author: W. D. Ehrhart - Tags: Essays **Listen to this article** Your browser does not support audio playback. [Open the audio recording](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/bf/2cbf55d5-edac-4019-bf5c-bf6b4bf7d745/content/media/2026/10/cox-google-algieba.mp3?ref=merionwest.com). Listen to this articleAI narration · 15 min 0.75×1×1.25×1.5×2× 15 0:00 15:08 I first met Joe Cox at a conference at the University of Notre Dame in December of 1993 called “The United States and Viet Nam from War to Peace.” Early on in the three-day conference, he approached me and introduced himself. He knew who I was; he had read a great deal of my writing, and he liked it. This is rare today; it was unheard of more than thirty years ago. I immediately liked the man. Although he was in civilian clothes, he explained that he was a colonel in the United States Army teaching English literature at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Colonel Cox was at the conference to deliver a paper titled “American War Myths and Vietnam Veteran Narratives.”[1](#%5Fftn1) A “lifer” officer in the army? And one delivering an academic paper on literature? I had not had any contact with the active-duty military in over twenty-five years, and I was not too keen on things martial. The only image I could conjure was Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf. ![Black-and-white illustration of Joe Cox and W. D. Ehrhart posing together on the beach, with Ocean City 2018 written below](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2c/bf/2cbf55d5-edac-4019-bf5c-bf6b4bf7d745/content/images/2026/10/ocean-city-2018-typewriter.png) But Colonel Cox liked my writing! That earned Joe big points in Ehrhart’s Spiritual Bank. We had several good conversations over the next couple of days, and I found him very likable and interesting. He mentioned that he, too, wrote poetry. By this point in my life—my mid-forties—I had made the mistake far too often of responding to such a declaration by saying that I would like to see some of said poetry. Typically, this resulted in my having to slog through Poetry Amateur Hour and then figure out something to say that would be neither hurtful nor an outright lie. But this man liked my writing, and he was a career army officer, which made me curious, so I said that I would be interested in seeing some of his poetry. A week later, a large manila envelope arrived in the mail. I opened it and began reading. To my surprise, the poems were not all about marching around and polishing his brass. Indeed, only a couple of poems dealt with war at all. Most of the poems were about love and family and his pet dog.[2](#%5Fftn2) And they were very good. Here is one of my favorites: **Looking for Odd Jobs, Walt Whitman Repairs Emily** **Dickinson’s Back Porch Door—May 14th, 1850** Breeze-beaten hawthorn petals collect against the barn. You doff your black hat, roll up your sleeves, and start to work on the bulged door. From upstairs I watch you loaf— pick chokecherry blossoms, walk back and forth to the well, and, drunk on your own perfume, dance on thick legs in heavy boots, mouthing an aria I never heard. Later the plane rasps its passing breath, the hammer, dull heartbeats, stillness. Your work complete, I lock the newly-snug door and retreat. A year or so later, I got a call from Colonel Cox, who asked me if I could come up to West Point. I asked, “What for?” He said he wanted me to talk to his cadets. I asked, “What about?” He said he was using one of my collections of poetry in a course. I said, “Are you freakin’ nuts? You trying to get court-martialed or what?” After all, I have nothing good to say about war in general, the Vietnam War in particular, or the government that sent me halfway around the world to kill, maim, and make miserable people who had never done me or my country any harm nor ever would or could. It turns out he was teaching a course he called “The Arts of War.” His students were studying the works Joe thought were the very best in their genres: Philip Caputo’s memoir [*A Rumor of War*](https://www.amazon.com/Rumor-War-Classic-Vietnam-Anniversary/dp/1250117127?ref=merionwest.com), Tim O’Brien’s novel [*The Things They Carried*](https://www.amazon.com/things-they-carried-Books/s?k=The+things+they+carried&rh=n%3A283155&ref=merionwest.com), Oliver Stone’s film [*Platoon*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091763/?ref=merionwest.com), the visual art of John Wolfe, and my poetry.[3](#%5Fftn3) And he brought each of the artists to West Point to visit his classes. That is how I came to find myself sitting in the kitchen of a home in New York while an Army colonel in uniform, silver eagles gleaming on his collar, stood at the stove cooking breakfast and asking me how I liked my eggs. Understand that when I was in the Marines, my battalion commander was only a *lieutenant* colonel, and he was a *god*. I had to keep reminding myself that I was no longer an eighteen-year-old lance corporal. But the visit went very well, as did the classes. I saw him again in February of 1998 at the Air Force Academy, where we were both part of a conference called the [National Character and Leadership Symposium](https://www.usafa.edu/national-character-leadership-symposium-ncls/?ref=merionwest.com). But I figured that would be the last time I would ever see him because he was about to retire after thirty years of a distinguished career that included service in Vietnam, becoming a paratrooper and a ranger, commanding units up to battalion level, earning a doctorate in American literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and finishing as a tenured professor at West Point. I figured he would buy a hunting lodge in rural Montana and go fly-fishing. However, a couple of months later, I got a call from him telling me that he was now the headmaster of The Haverford School, a boys' school in Haverford, Pennsylvania. The following spring, he invited me to the school to speak to a few classes and share my poetry, inviting me again in the spring of 2000. Then, in January of 2001, he called me one night to say that he had lost an English teacher to a medical disability on short notice, and he needed me to come and teach that spring semester. "When?" "Like, tomorrow." I gave him half a dozen reasons why I could not do it, but he countered each one. The last was that he had to rent a car for me because we were then living in Philadelphia and had only one car, and I could not leave my wife every day without a car. When he said he would lend me his Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible for the semester, I said, "Okay, I’ll do it for one semester." One semester. I retired in June of 2019. The fact is that I had quit one too many teaching jobs without ever winning a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award, and, in my forties, I had reached a point where I could not even get a job interview, let alone a job. My résumé said, "If you hire me, I’ll quit." I had by the late 1990s managed to cobble together something vaguely resembling a living as a poet, writer, and speaker, but I had been struggling for a decade, and still was. ## “Joe completely changed the last thirty years of my life for the better.” But Joe had seen me interacting with students—okay, they wore uniforms and saluted anything that moved, but they were still just kids—and he knew what I could do. He told me later that he knew if he could get me there, I would sell myself to the faculty just by being me, and he turned out to be right. And the years I taught at The Haverford School restored my self-confidence and gave me a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment that I had never before experienced. Joe completely changed the last thirty years of my life for the better. Selling myself to the students, however, at least at the outset, was not quite as easy. I took over mid-year for a teacher who had been very popular with many of the students. And a number of them made it clear that they did not like me at all and did not want me there. I think Joe must have gotten wind of this because one day as I was teaching, he came into the room, walked up to me, said loudly enough for the room to hear, "I’m glad you’re here," and gave me a hug. It was Joe’s way of saying to the boys, "I like this guy, and you should, too." But Joe not only transformed my life; he transformed The Haverford School community. Joe was a ranger, a paratrooper, and a war veteran, but he wrote poetry, hugged other men unabashedly, and wept in public sometimes. He made it safe for a football player or a wrestler to be up on stage in the spring musical singing and dancing or to enter a painting in the student art show. As far as I know, he hired the first openly gay faculty member. He started bringing in students of color at elementary school age, leading to a highly successful retention rate. He also understood—because he himself had come from a working-class background—that at a school like Haverford, diversity did not just mean adding students of color but also students from blue-collar backgrounds. Among my favorite students over the years—at the school on a full scholarship—was a white kid whose dad was a union plumber. Joe did add a significant number of minority kids—I think perhaps to the consternation and displeasure of at least some parents and alumni—and I remember the first class I had, years into my time there, that included three African American kids who had been at Haverford since elementary school, which changed the entire dynamic in the classroom. With one kid of color (or, rarely in my first years, even two), every time the subject of race came up, all the white kids would look at that one kid to see how he would react. But three kids shifted the center of gravity. The year before I retired, I had an American history class with sixteen students, ten of whom were black or South Asian. And not all the black kids were scholarship kids, either. I had all sorts of stuff hanging on the walls of my classroom designed to get all of the boys thinking. Various favorite quotations: Samuel Johnson’s "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel"; I. F. Stone’s "Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed"; Scott Ritter’s "I can train a monkey to wave an American flag; that does not make the monkey patriotic"; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s "Well-behaved women seldom make history." I had a watercolor of a Burmese woman breastfeeding an infant painted by a friend of mine. I had a large reprint of Eduard Charlemont’s [*The Moorish Chief*](https://www.philamuseum.org/objects/102792?ref=merionwest.com). And there was a poster of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, Haverford School Class of 1898, saying that he had spent his career being a high-class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers, a racketeer for capitalism. Although I am sure some people were uncomfortable with what I displayed in my classroom, Joe knew exactly who he was hiring, so none of this surprised him. Indeed, he used to bring people around to show them my classroom. More than once, he told me the story of a board member who complained to him about the communist he had working for him. Joe’s reply was, "Oh no, you’re wrong. Ehrhart’s only a communist on a good day." (I do have to say that on the day that man’s second son graduated, he came up to me practically in tears and thanked me for what I had done for his boys.) I think a lot of people thought I had Joe’s ear about matters relating to the school. But the truth is that Joe never, in the dozen years he was my boss, discussed school affairs with me, even though we spent a lot of time together enjoying our friendship, which began before either of us came to Haverford and continued right up to his death. Only the other day, my former student Erich Prince of *Merion West* said he was surprised that Joe and I had been so close because we seemed so different. And we were different. For one thing, I spent three years in the Marines and could hardly wait to get out while Joe spent three years in the army, and then re-upped for another twenty-seven years. Joe understood and, I think, largely agreed with my perspective on the American War in Vietnam: that it was a misbegotten disaster that never should have happened. But I came to reject entirely the notion of "American exceptionalism," finally concluding that the United States was and is just another empire like Britain or Rome, no worse, but no better. Joe, on the other hand, I think believed that while the Vietnam War was wrongheaded, the United States and its government were still...how does one say it? The good guys. The guys in the white hats. Motivated by the best of intentions and a higher morality. But our differences of opinion had no impact on our friendship and mutual respect, and we did have more than a little common ground between us. Certainly our military service itself was a bond, especially when we both got to The Haverford School, a community in which—among parents, faculty, and alumni—there were very few combat veterans. We also shared a love of poetry. Up until very near the end of his life, he would regularly send me drafts of poems, and I would often send him work of mine. And we shared a love of body surfing. Yes, body surfing. We were both very good at it. Even after he retired and sold his condo in Ocean City, New Jersey, every summer he would rent a place for a week for himself, his two children, and his four grandchildren, and I would always come down for a day, and we would go body surfing: **“Old Men Body Surfing”** for Joe & Me You should have seen the two of them: sixty-five, seventy, maybe older, pot-bellied, gray-haired, wrinkled like God had given them skin two sizes too big, riding wave after wave after wave all the way in to the surf line, giving each other the thumbs up, then doddering back into the ocean to catch the next wave. Shameless exhibitionists. Acting like kids. One of them had a ponytail, for chrissake.[4](#%5Fftn4) After Joe retired from The Haverford School (he served as headmaster from 1998 until 2013), he took the position of head of upper school at La Jolla Country Day School in San Diego as a favor to a friend who needed help in a pinch. And wouldn’t you know it? Although we did not get to go body surfing in California, he did have me out to the school for a week as the poet-in-residence both years he was there. Joe Cox transformed the last three decades of my life. I can hardly begin to express how much he meant to me or how much I came to love him. Moreover, Joe made The Haverford School a better place. Joe made the world a better place. It is hard—and painful—to think of this world without him in it. ### W. D. Ehrhart’s most recent books are [*Smart Fish Don’t Bite*](https://moonstone-arts-center.square.site/product/ehrhart-w-d-smart-fish-don-t-bite/YD2QGAXXBUFHBNEM4K6HS6AF?cs=true&cst=custom&utm%5Fmedium=email&%5Fhsenc=p2ANqtz-%5FW-lL6cwwW8bsQANmJwm3MsSw-S42Z2xGh0k2oeotYQjMZaBNz9DqAOukdKP95CuNaM19QsZuXdCh2rJglFzD6U6sG4g&%5Fhsmi=380810861&utm%5Fcontent=380810861&utm%5Fsource=hs%5Femail) from Moonstone Arts and [*Getting Shot At: Essays on War, Conflict & Culture Clash*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1476658625?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&ref=merionwest.com) from McFarland & Company, Inc. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wales at Swansea and taught English and history at The Haverford School from 2001 to 2019. **Footnotes** **1.** Cox’s essay can be found in *The United States and Viet Nam from War to Peace*, Robert M. Slabey, ed., McFarland & Company, Inc., 1996. **2.** These poems were eventually published in *Garden’s Close*, Joseph T. Cox, Thirteenth Angel Press, 2002. **3.** The book of mine he was using at the time was *Just for Laughs*, Viet Nam Generation & Burning Cities Press, 1990. **4.** There is a version of the poem in *Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems*, W. D. Ehrhart, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2019.