In 1965, I was an eighth grader at Virginia’s Staunton Military Academy, a school now long defunct. One day a classmate, Thomas A., told me the story of his Armenian grandmother, how some Turkish troops had entered her village, how she had hidden away either in a cellar or under a bed (that detail has vanished from my memory) while neighbors and family members were either shot or bayoneted, and how she and a few others had escaped and eventually made their way to the United States. I was too young and ignorant at the time to understand that Thomas was relating to me a detail of the Armenian genocide, when in World War I and afterward the Ottoman Empire murdered around 1.5 million Armenians. The reasons behind this genocide were both religious—the Turks were Muslims, the Armenians Christians—and political. In the latter case, the Turks feared that the Armenians …