I’ll admit: At this military park I see not so much death and mayhem, attacks and retreats, batteries and strategies, but a timeline of my life, at least the last half. I remember the beauty of Shiloh’s full moons and of its groomed grounds iced with late berets of snowfalls. I almost can feel my cold fingertips and nose on a frigid, long ago New Year’s Eve in a duck boat on the Tennessee River near Pittsburg Landing.
I can close my eyes and see schoolchildren scampering across the infamous Peach Orchard in springtime, and taste a sweet picnic apple on the spot where Gen. Johnston bled to death.
I recall my happy nephews donning the visitor center’s blue and gray props and posing for photographs, laughing at themselves in the mirror. And, if the moment is right, I still see candles, thousands of them, burning holes in a January night.
It comes to this: Scabbed-over battle sites make good parks.
This day, I am trying to concentrate on the reason my personal, poignant playground exists. I make an effort, a month before the battle’s anniversary, to remember the tremendous cost: nearly 24,000 casualties.
It is cliche that war is not begun by those who must finish it. But cliches are nothing but truth described well. Not only did the soldiers here at Shiloh not start the fight, most didn’t know how to fight. They were about as equipped for battle as my giggling young nephews preening in those oversized park service coats.
Those who did survive Shiloh two days in April 1862 grew up in a hurry. Those who didn’t were dumped in mass graves to prevent the spread of disease.
In a way, the war finished all of them.
You would think a nation so soon at war with itself might forever shy from battles beyond its shores, but that luxury has eluded us. Even now, young men and women who didn’t start the conflicts are enduring and finishing them in places most of us citizens couldn’t find on a map. And the shark politicians and their military industrial complex handlers are forever voting, investing and planning for more war.
My family has letters from my great-great-grandfather lost at Second Manassas. He wrote to his wife in a scrawled longhand, his vocabulary better than his spelling. He gave instructions about how to make the most of the family farm’s corn, thanked his wife for sending locks of their children’s hair and asked for shirts made from dark cloth, as dark as she could weave. And he addressed contingencies:
“If it should happen so I never should see you in this world I am in hopes we will meet in a world where there is no such thing as war and disturbance. ... We may get a long happy life together yet and if gain our liberty it will give me and you great satisfaction to know that I took a part in the conflict.”
There was to be no long, happy life, or future togetherness, no great satisfaction in taking part in the conflict. There was nothing, not a proper burial or even definite word to her of his death.
Where he fell, however, there is a park, and luckier souls than he today fly kites and ride bicycles, hike and picnic, remembering occasionally and at leisure the reason the roads are paved and the monuments gleam.
Rheta Grimsley Johnson is a nationally syndicated newspaper colunnist and author.
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