Honor

      I received a letter today from my father.  When I created this blog, I had decided not to post letters from friends and family because I didn't want to reveal what was meant only between myself and my loved ones, but I couldn't stop myself from allowing this one to be read.  It's message is profound and it makes me think of a time far removed, when I might have been reading words from home hunched over in a cold rain, my rifle leaning heavily against a tree as I eyed the treeline between sentences, waiting for the first skirmish line of grey uniforms to appear like ghosts in the gathering gloom. 

Zeb:
     I think about you often.  I think about where you are and what you are experiencing and I realize that in many ways it will change you forever.  Not necessarily in any visible way, but profoundly change the way you view things.  I hope this is not coming across too dramatic or philosophical but it brought to my mind an excerpt from a Bruce Cotton book.  His trilogy on the Army of the Potomac, is is from the preface to the first book, Mr. Lincoln's Army.  It is, in my opinion, one of the best and moving of all of the collections of words that anyone has ever written. 

    "The books which make up this trilogy began, very simply, as an attempt to understand the men who fought in the Army of the Potomac.  As a small boy I had known a number of these men in their old age, they were grave, dignified and thoughtful, with big white beards and a general air of being pillars of the community.  They lived in rural Michigan in the pre-automobile age and, for the most part, they had never been fifty miles away from the farm or dusty village streets; yet once, ages ago, they had been everywhere and had seen everything and nothing had happened to them thereafter that meant anything much.  All that was real had taken place when they were young, everything after that had simply been a process of waiting for death, which did not frighten them much.  They had seen it inflicted in the worst possible way on boys who had not bargained for it, and they had enough of the old-fashioned religion to believe without any question that when they passed over they would simply be rejoining men and ways of living which they had known long ago."
     I love you and long for your safe return.


                                                                             Papa

     When I visited Washington, DC before I left for basic training, one of my favorite monuments in the entire city was the one erected in memory of the Grand Army of the Republic, which I thought sounded like something from a world so different from ours as to be almost made up.  One of the ways we as a society should be judged is in how we honor those who came before us, showing us the right and the good.