Editor’s Note: Gary Armstrong spent the spring semester teaching at Harlaxton College in Grantham, England, as part of William Jewell’s cooperative overseas study program with the University of Evansville. In the pages that follow, he offers his perspectives on what it was like to be an American overseas during a time of international turmoil.

The largest parliamentary revolt in British history. Fury at the French when The Times poll showed only 1 in 3 wanted Saddam to lose. Angry arguments over whether the BBC had skewed its war coverage. Taking students to Nottingham to hear a debate featuring a neo-Marxist political philosopher denouncing America for submitting to a “neo-fascist junta” led by a “know-nothing fundamentalist.”

Being in Harlaxton with 12 Jewell students and my young family for the spring semester was quite a time. For those of us at Harlaxton, life began to change before the war began. We had mandatory security briefings, complete with sensible advice about traveling during the crisis; the best advice was to remember that most of the world thinks Americans just are too loud and to soften our voices. In other changes, a promising new internship with the British Parliament fell apart when Parliament went on “code black” alert and foreigners were prohibited in the building. Students attended the huge anti-war demonstrations and came away with quite an education.

Most of the demonstrations were very peaceful, and during the “2 million person march” the BBC regularly interviewed young British families who were participating in demonstrations for the first time in their lives. But particular images left some students quite disturbed. Seing a crowd rip apart the Stars & Stripes in Dublin, while a man dressed like an Iraqi Republican Guard covered with fake blood pretended to machine-gun the crowd that roared its approval, really shook one American student. Though she was herself left-wing and anti-war, she wondered aloud who that crowd actually wanted to win.

On the eve of war, as the American ultimatum expired, Harlaxton’s new principal, former Jewell President Gordon Kingsley, gave a “what you need to know” speech, borrowing from Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, that left no eye dry. Once the war began, most of us got a lot of worried email and phone calls from family and friends.

Jewell students at Harlaxton during the spring semester of 2003.

Especially popular were emails that portrayed the whole of Europe as now anti-American, with most Americans enduring utter rudeness, waiters refusing to serve them, taxi cab drivers putting Americans on the street, etc. My wife and I had a short discussion about whether to cancel our family´s trip to Paris and the D-Day beaches, scheduled for the second week of the war. We decided to go ahead, carefully explaining to our young children that the U.S. gov-ernment was not popular, that many thoughtful people opposed getting rid of Saddam (we also explained they were wrong), and how we as a family would deal with any questions or rudeness. And not a thing happened. The French were marvelous – and especially worthy of commendation were the restaurant waiters of Paris and Bayeux, who joked with our kids, helped us translate menu French, and never once were anything but gracious. At the end of the day, I thought the fear was completely over-blown and that Americans needed to chill out.

Of course, the first week of war was rough on everyone ´s nerves at Harlaxton. One colleague later told me she regularly couldn´t sleep those first few days. Reading and watching the British media was fascinating. Huge debates erupted about analyzing the war. To some, the fedayeen fighting in the rear heralded a political-military disaster. As the Brits always love historical parallels, we began to see regular features on Britain’s ill-starred 1956 “Suez intervention” into Egypt. To others, who turned out to be right, the real dynamic of the war was never the harassment of a few Saddam die-hards in the rear, but the remarkable drive of the American Army’s Third Division and the US Marines towards Baghdad. I did note that Britain’s pre-eminent military historian, John Keegan (author of Face of Battle and Six Armies in Normandy), was one of the few to get things consistently right: He saw early on that Saddam’s regime didn’t have a coherent battle plan, that it appeared that much of the Iraqi Army was going home, and that the Republican Guard was simply falling apart.

Linda and Gary Armstrong with their children Katherine,Michael, and Paul

Government and parliamentary politics in the war were a marvel. Some feared a real constitutional crisis because it wasn’t clear that the House of Commons would vote on war. I enjoyed teasing British friends that Britons had always said that the British political system was superior because the prime minister had so much more power than the American president and now it wasn’t clear they wanted it that way.

Then came April 9, the liberation of Baghdad, and all its surprises. The images were stunning. So was the fact that until the very end the BBC and anti-war papers like The Guardian did not show any, any, pictures of Iraqis welcoming British or American forces. That was not all. Generally, the British media, including pro-war papers, developed real anger over “lack of fire discipline” by American troops. Every ill-advised American moment, from shooting whole families at roadstops to poorly timed displays of Old Glory, was pictured as the “American way of war,” some version of shoot first, and don’t bother with questions. The rather deliberate, if now downright slow, British operation in Basra generally was discussed as showing a much superior British concern for “the hearts and minds” and reflecting a superior British military culture that learned the lessons of long patrols in the old empire or Northern Ireland. The scenes of rioting and looting in Baghdad after the war were normally talked about as the result of decisions by dumb Americans who just didn’t understand the importance of political and historical continuity. The general feeling was that British forces, had they been in Baghdad, would have done the job right. That, of course, sets aside how things went in Basra. Everyone talks of the “special relationship” between Washington and London. Perhaps that makes us assume that the Brits will always be with us to the bitter end. (Setting aside Suez and Vietnam, of course.) Having been there, watching the seesaw of opinion and hearing the not infrequently shrill debates, I can’t help thinking of what the Duke of Wellington supposedly said about the Battle of Waterloo: It was a very near run thing.