The Way I See It

            History has always been personal to me. It has parasitically latched onto me and there are times when I wish it had not. When I am pensive, my mind flooded with memories and observations which I want to share but am afraid to do so because I question whether they really matter at all, I wish I could forget that the past had ever occurred. Studying history, in particular military history, has made me rather cynical. While I have never been in combat, I know how it affects some people. I know how a lot of politicians and their ilk have twisted it and glorified it to suit their own purposes. I know that the effects of war affect the civilians almost as much as it does the men fighting it.  The melancholia of living with the memories is as palpable decades afterward as they were when they were still fresh. As an historian, those impressions overwhelm me at times and make it nearly impossible for me to write.

            History teaches relationships between cause and effect, between perceived reality and reality, between legend and memory, between rage and fear. The list of correlations could go on ad infinitum. People and their basic reactions to stress, fear, and death have never changed. They are part of an eternal continuum than spans the centuries of human existence. My particular quest is to discover, as accurately as I can, what happened on the alleged “fields of glory,”

            On a personal level, I can relate to the intense fear that a person experiences when coming within a second of dying violently. During recurring spats with physical and mental exhaustion I can almost feel the blade of the hunting knife being held against my throat from behind and hearing, “Don’t move.” The incident occurred 56 years ago, when I was 13, but I recall it a vividly as if it had just happened. I remember lying awake at night, frozen in place in my bed, anxiously watching the shadows of the tree branches outside the bedroom window dance menacingly against the pulled window blinds, waiting for the assailant to make a second call while I slept.

            I know what it is like to watch someone very close to me die. The face grows pale then gray. The eyes lock in their sockets and grow dull. The death rattle fills the room with its ominous, rapid clatter and the fingers grow indescribably cold as it creeps progressively up the left arm. The rattling stops. Life is gone, just as Walt Whitman described his hospital experience with a dying soldier. Some things never change and never will.

            I can still see an employee, who had just been severely beaten, on her back on the floor. Eyes fixed but still alive, shivering uncontrollably, yet still as a corpse, not dead but seemingly so. Her boyfriend had stolen onto the jobsite and roughed her up then left her to lie there.

            I remember regaining consciousness after a student kicked me unconscious, having no recollection of what had transpired seconds before. My glasses lay askew to one side. My hearing aids flanked me on either side. I cannot recall him repeatedly kicking me in the chest and head. I still cringe at videos of anyone needlessly getting kicked while down. They trigger memories I would prefer to leave in the shadows. Hyper-vigilance and I have become lifelong companions.

            I just read an article about a study of generational trauma concerning Civil War veterans and the longevity of their male offspring. Many historians could honestly verify that “The sins of the father are visited upon the children.” Many who have had relatives in the Holocaust, who survived the Great Depression of the 1930’s, or who was raised in abject poverty has experienced some generational trauma. Children perceive the world through their parents’ eyes and will probably pass on, to some degree those influences, to the generation which follows them.

            So it is when I write history. Rifled shells “Scream.” Twelve pounder Napoleons “ring.” The faces of the dead and dying glow phosphorescently in the moonlight of a humid, sultry spring night in the mosquito infested swamp land along the James River. Men reek of sweat and wood smoke and scratch the lice and wood ticks imbedded in their clothing and their skin. They weep uncontrollably when a friend dies in their arms and often swear out of frustration and hopelessness. Others just leave their comrades where they lay because they have no choice and can do nothing for them because after all “Death is just Death.”

            My experiences growing up have shaped who I am and not always for the better. I understand from my past why I write history the way I do. It is a mixed curse/blessing. Sometimes I have to put my writing down because it gets too vivid. Erich Maria Remarque, in All Quiet on the Western Front unknowingly, of course, described my approach to history best when he wrote:

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure. For death is not an adventure with those who stand face-to-face with it. It will try, simply, to tell of a generation of men, who even though they may have escaped its shells but were destroyed by the war.”