SEAS professor leaves lab for Afghan deployment

FORWARD OPERATING BASE AIRBORNE, Afghanistan (AP) — Last year, Kit Parker was a Harvard professor. Today, he is a U.S. Army major in Afghanistan.

Parker has spent his whole career juggling two unlikely professions: Teaching and fighting. He returned in December to Afghanistan, where he has been involved in numerous firefights and attacks on his convoys with roadside bombs.

His unusual career path has put the 43-year-old in what he calls "the two extremes of human condition."

"You have Afghanistan, where you have ... 90 percent illiteracy, people living in mud huts, roughly the 12th century," says Parker, a towering man with a shaved head, darting blue eyes, a southern drawl and an apparently strong command of just about any subject he talks about. "And then you got people at Harvard, where supposedly we are all literate and have all kinds of education available to us. How more different can these two environments be?"

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