From Winslow, a work in progress:

Joshua Winslow
New York 24^th
Hagerstown, Maryland
September 11, 1862

Miss Sarah Davison
Winslow, New York

My Dearest Sarah,

After a hard march of five days, we have stopped, at least momentarily. We are near Hagerstown, Maryland. I’m not sure when I will be able to post this letter. We have been moving quickly of late.

We have been ordered to rest for at least this day and maybe the next. I am writing this letter as the sun is setting over a tent-covered ridge to the west. No fires are permitted after dark, lest the glow of them alert the rebel forces of our position.

The place where we are was once a farm, or more accurately several farms covering hundreds of acres of fertile ground blanketing graceful and gentle hills. If there were a place to rival the beauty of our home in New York, this would be it. What few buildings stand here, barns and farmhouses, have been occupied by the officers as temporary command posts.

I can now barely imagine what this place looked like before the Union Army arrived. It was a quiet place and gentle in its stillness. Now, in any direction I look I see an ocean of men and tents, all moving in small waves. It’s as if a large living organism has engulfed this place and forever destroyed its tranquility. When we arrived here yesterday we thought that we were the last, but more men kept arriving through the night. There must be over ten thousand men here by now and still more come every hour. They have come from all over the Union, from Maine and Vermont, from a place called Deer Island, from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, from Illinois and Michigan and Ohio.

And also from New York. My sweet, beloved New York. I remember this time of year up in Winslow as my favorite. The stifling heat of August has broken but the days are still warm and golden, perfect for a picnic near a lake with my love. When the sun goes down, the evenings are cool again. Down here, the heat has not broken and that five-day march was brutal. Several men in our unit collapsed with heat exhaustion and had to be left behind. Many of the men arriving in camp are on stretchers. The drummer boys formed bucket brigades to distribute water from the stream flowing through the middle of the camp.

When I think about the purpose of this convergence of humanity, this temporary city, I try to imagine the destruction it is capable of and I become fearful. I imagine all of these men and their rifles, headed toward me and I can see no escape and I am helpless. Surely we are all here for a reason. Somewhere beyond the horizon is a similar force trying to find us as much as we are trying to find them.

Rumors fly around and buzz through the camp like so many gnats. First we hear that we will continue west and meet the rebels in northwestern Virginia. Then we hear that the rebels are heading north through central Maryland and that we will attack them as they pass to the east of us. Another rumor tells us that they are already to the north of us in Pennsylvania. Still another says that they are to the south of us near Sharpsburg. For all of these to be true we would have to be surrounded by them. As unlikely as that may be, it still gives us all an uneasy feeling that we don’t talk about much.

Our Captain spends most of his time over at the command post that has been set up in a nearby farmhouse. Several times today he has walked through our encampment on foot. Normally when we see him and he addresses us, he is on horseback. Today, he walked through our camp, making sure we were resting, and that we had enough to eat. He is a man of some forty years with a graying beard and a regal manner. He has always had a stern look about him that appeared to be his duty to maintain, but today the sternness was replaced by a deeper, more serious look. His boots were scuffed and his uniform was still dusty from our march as he walked through our camp with his lieutenants. He spoke to us in small groups. He seemed to know more than he would tell us, but nobody was going to speak up and ask a Captain what was going to happen. Instead, he diverted our attention by asking us about ourselves, our names, where we were from. When I said, “Joshua Winslow, Winslow New York, sir,” he turned and approached me. I’ve now gotten used to how people react when I tell them I have the same name as my hometown, but this was different. As he walked toward me, a look of recognition come over his face as he repeated, “Joshua Winslow, Winslow New York.”

“Son, is your father Erastus Winslow?” he asked.

“Yes sir.”

“I know your father, son. We attended Harvard together and I visited him in Winslow some twenty-years ago. We have met several times in Manhattan when he was there on business.”

Then he did something that I’ve never seen an officer do to a private infantryman. He held out his hand to me. After over a year in the army, serving with boys from all different stations of life, I had forgotten that I come from a family of wealth and position. Indeed, I had spent most of my time keeping that a secret and in many ways I found comfort in fitting in with the rest of the fellows. Of course, all the boys from Winslow know, but many others in the 24^th didn’t. When I was growing up, I always felt a weight on my shoulders walking down Main Street in Winslow. My family owns most of the town, so I could never be sure if people were friendly to me because of me or because of my father’s position. I also felt a weight of expectation on me not only from my father, but from nearly everyone in town.

The anonymity of being just myself in the army, not a town, not a family, not a legacy, felt liberating. While others bristled as they adapted to military discipline, I embraced it because it made me feel, for the first time in my life, like I was like anybody else. It’s hard to find your way when you feel the expectations of your family and community weighing on you. I think that when I finally return home, it will be with knowledge of myself that I never would have been able to gain at home.

The small throng of soldiers that were around the Captain and myself were looking at me and several more who were nearby and heard what was happening joined the group.

I glanced at the other men and realized that I could not deny my heritage any more than I could deny my loyalty and devotion to them. I may have forgotten it, but it’s also who I am, now, it seemed as though I stood form them with this Captain, as if his recognition of me was his recognition of all of them.

I took his hand in mine. His grasp was firm and he pulled me closer. Quietly, for my ears only he said, “Your father is a fine man and I know he is proud of you, son. God bless you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He released my hand and I took a step back from him. He stood there silently for a moment and raised his hand to the side of his face ran his fingers down the edge of his beard. His sternness was replaced momentarily by a puzzled look and his eyes suddenly seemed tired. Then he regarded the whole crowd that had gathered around us and said loudly to them, “And God Bless all of you.”

Then he gripped the hem of his dusty uniform coat, tugged on it firmly to straighten it out over his shoulders, and nodded to his lieutenants that it was time to continue their tour.

It was probably this event that has put me in such a reflective mood for the rest of the day. It is obvious to me that we are soon to be in as large a battle as any of us has ever seen. All of us can sense it. Even if all we know are rumors and all of them cannot be true, our experience tells us that one of them actually is true.

In this past year I have seen many things that I never would have imagined growing up in Winslow. Most of my experiences have been bad and I’d prefer never to experience them again. The hatred in the eyes of those who should be our brothers and sisters but are instead our enemy. Firing our weapons at them and cutting them down during the riot in Baltimore. Seeing an army move over the landscape, destroying everything in its path, not by fighting but simply by trampling it under its boots and consuming every barrel of grain and every bit of livestock just to feed its hungry hordes. Seeing my closest friends slowly dying from disease and wondering why them and not me.

I fear that this war, which we all thought would be over by last spring, is going to be far more destructive than anything we might have imagined. I can only look around at the ocean of men stretching out in all directions to the horizon to tell me that. I fear that I have only had a glimpse of the horrors that are to come.

During all this time, the letters that you have written to me have sustained me. They are now a quite handsome stack and I carry them in a small leather bag that hangs over my shoulder. I can’t count how many times I’ve read each one of them. I read them in the morning when I awake. I read them when we are marching down a dusty road, I read them when we are resting on the side of the road and I read them by firelight before slipping into my tent and dreaming about you.

In all of the letters you’ve written to me, I’ve seen numerous references to my smile. It’s not something that I would normally think about myself, but you mention it when talking about that first dance we had, the smile I would greet you with when you came into my father’s store, and the smile you imagine I will have for you on the day I finally return home.

When you wrote about that smile, you told me how it made you feel, as if you were the most important person in the world for me and how special it made you feel that your presence alone could bring such joy. I’ll tell you now and forever that I was totally unaware that I was smiling and that it can only mean that it was simply a true and natural expression of how you make me feel.

There is a sense of joy and wonder that I feel. It is like that sense of joy and wonder that we find when we are out walking along a beautiful stream or through the woods. It’s that sense of wonder about all of Creation. And in addition to all those beautiful things that God has given the world, he also, for some reason that he alone knows, added you. I spend all my days and nights filled with joy and wonder that you exist, and I can’t imagine that living in a world that didn’t have you in it would be worth living.

In all the hardships that I have endured, and in all the hardships that I will endure, my faith has been and will always be tested. My faith in myself, my faith in our cause, my faith in humanity and ultimately my faith in all the world. It is the joy and wonder that that you bring to me, and that alone, that sustains my faith. In a world that is marching down a path of violence and destruction, your letters, and you yourself, tell me that no matter where we may be now and whatever may happen to us, the world is ultimately a beautiful and just place and that God’s covenant with us is enduring. I know this because he has given me you.

All my love,

Joshua

On September 17, 1862 the Battle of Antietam was fought near Sharpsburg, Maryland.  More Americans died on that day than any other single day in American military history.

One thousand.

It’s an impressive number, but not too large that it overwhelms us.  It’s not a million, or one hundred thousand, or even ten thousand. those numbers are too large allow us to see the individual trees for the forest.  Or the individual people in the crowd.  One thousand people would fit comfortably in a single section of a single deck in a modern sports stadium. Or comfortably fill the floor seats in an arena at a political convention.

From a distance we can see the crowd, but if we want to, if we chose to, we can we can focus in and see each individual.  If we can see an individual, we can imagine who he or she is. Maybe the soldier comes from a poor rural area in West Virginia or a desperate ghetto in New York City or Los Angeles  and volunteered for service as a way to pay for an education.  Or maybe they come from a family and a patriotic community in upstate New York where military service is a common value and tradition.  For each, it’s a unique set of circumstances and desires that inspires him or her to volunteer. These include a desire for personal achievement, a desire to provide a better life for their families, a desire to serve and protect their communities and their nation.

For each of the one thousand, we can imagine a broken family.  Maybe there is a younger sister who adored older brother who once made her angry by teasing her when she was a little girl and once again with his smothering overprotection when she became a teenager.  We can imagine her crying all night long on the day her brother shipped out.

Imagine the soldier had a mother who, for all of his life, had only one identity, one role that mattered: mother.  She raised him right.  She picked him up when he fell, she cradled him when he cried, she disciplined him when he needed it.  She had an abiding faith in the goodness of God and she did all she could to instill this faith in her son, so that for all his life his conscience would  guide him and protect him.  When he went off to war, she prayed to God every morning and every night for his safe return.  And when he was killed by an I.E.D on his way back to base camp after a surviving hazardous patrol, she wondered why God had abandoned her.  Maybe in time she can put the broken shards of her faith back together and make peace with the universe, but the certainty of that happening is by no means assured. Who are we to judge if she cannot?

His father has no outlet for his grief.  It is his duty to comfort his grieving wife and sobbing daughter, but their pain (like his own) is beyond his reach.

All those who knew him are left with an impenetrable void that will be with them for the rest of their lives. While this void will never be filled, his memory is always with them.  They remember him forever as he was: young, optimistic, looking to the future with the aura of invincibility only the young and innocent can possess.  He never ages. An ethereal spirit, he becomes an idealized and why shouldn’t that happen?  What in his young life could he possibly had done to deserve his senseless fate?  He is silent and passes no judgment, but in moments of moral ambiguity the people he left behind think of him and wonder what he would think about the choices they make.  He becomes their conscience.

May the politicians and generals who presume to lead, and to all of us who grant them our permission to lead, devote at least some small part of our conscience to the forever young.

The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn’t want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy.

That’s how it was for children then.  If the soundtrack of my childhood was provided by the Beatles, the quiet rumbling counterpoint was Vietnam.  I was far too young to truly understand or to be directly affected by the war, but there was no doubt that it mattered to the adults and near-adults around me.  It mattered to the neighbor’s son who got drafted and the other neighbor’s son who volunteered.  It mattered to the older brothers of my and my sister’s playmates who were old enough to be facing the draft.  It mattered to the Methodist church youth group and boy scout troop whose young leaders considered their options, some choosing to serve, some choosing Canada.  They were boys I looked up to, who carried the flag in the Queens Anniversary Day parade, who organized volleyball games at church picnics, who taught me how to hold a baseball bat, and who taught me how to tie a square knot.

Although I was too young to get drafted and both my older siblings were girls, there wasn’t one circle of relationships in my young life – family, school, neighborhood, church – that was left untouched by the war.  And not one adult in my life was left unaffected.  In the stoic silence of a friend’s father when a name was mentioned, in the joy in that same father’s voice when talking about his son’s imminent transfer stateside, in the funereal mood in another family’s living room presided over by a framed eight by ten on the mantelpiece, in my parents’ dinner table conversations about this or that person’s son, the war affected me in ways I am only coming to understand now.

These wars that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are not ours the way Vietnam was.    The men and woman who fight, and  their families, are but a small segment of our society.  They come from the rural regions, and from inner cities where military service offered a way out.  They come from families with patriotic traditions of service.  As of now, there are 140,000 troops in Iraq and over 32,000 in Afghanistan.  At the end of 1968, in contrast, there were of half a million troops in Vietnam.  During the Vietnam era, the draft raised over 2 million men for service.  As unfair as the process was, with deferments less easy to obtain by the poor and minorities, it still reached deeper into our society.  Today, most of us remain untouched by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

These wars of today are given perfunctory coverage in the evening news, if they are covered at all.  The stories of the soldiers, their anguish and their terror suffered in our names, while we keep up with Angelina and Brad and Jennifer, are never heard.  The scars, physical and emotional, are invisible to most of us.

Ryan Smithson is a soldier in the Army Reserves from upstate New York who served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005.  Upon returning home, he began writing personal essays, recounting his time in Iraq and what it was like returning home.  Several of his essays have been published on the web and next month, his book, Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI, will be published by Harper-Collins.

Ryan’s essay “A Little Taste of Death” appeared in the Summer/Fall 2007 issue of the Oregon Literary Review, his essay “Silence and Silhouettes” appeared in Shattercolors Literary Review, and his essay “Hard Canvas” appeared in Identity Theory.

Ghosts of War

Ryan Smithson. Collins 2009, Hardcover, 336 pages, $5.75

This week, Salon.com is publishing a series of articles about the problems combat veterans are facing coming home.  Untreated PTSD and callous treatment by the military are driving suicide and homicide numbers to the highest levels in decades.  In the first article, we read about Adam Lieberman, whose problems were ignored by the army until he attempted suicide.  Before that, he was a drunk, a fuck-up, anything other than a soldier traumatized by harrowing and gruesome combat experiences.  Just reading about them sends jolts through my nervous system:

"A guy’s face was blown off from his nose to his chin," he said as we sat at his dining room table with Heidi while he was home on leave recently. The U.S. soldier was gagging, drowning in blood without a mouth or nose. A medic performed an emergency tracheotomy. The soldier died anyway.

During another engagement a gunner atop Adam’s Humvee suddenly collapsed in Adam’s lap. Only a thin flap of skin attached the gunner’s head and torso. Beheaded. Adam vomited.

He once saw the lower half of a friend’s body sheared off by a roadside bomb. In the seconds that followed before he died, his friend still moved his right arm and tried to talk. He looked at Adam. Adam described the look in his eyes as "terror."

Even after the attempted suicide, instead of proper treatment, the army charged him with defacing government property for writing his suicide note on a wall.  Then they got his mother to help them whitewash it.

The introduction to the series: "Death in the USA: The Army’s fatal neglect"

The first article: "The Death Dealers took my life!"