Auxiliarist Mark Snell

Auxiliarist Snell, Ph.D., is the founding director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War at Shepherd University and was a professor in Shepherd University’s Department of History before his retirement in 2013. He also is a retired U.S. Army officer, a former professor at West Point, and in 2008 was the visiting senior lecturer of war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He currently serves as national chief historian, U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary.

In the 2011 science fiction novel(and 2015 movie) The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney finds himself in an extraplanetary pickle. Marooned on Mars with no possibility of help arriving before his supplies run out, his survival hinges on his ability to fabricate complex life-support and communication systems with the limited equipment he has on hand. In true can-do spirit, he calmly assesses the situation and proceeds to, in his words, “science the s***” out of the problem.