Unknown
Yesterday, on my blog about Jimmy Carter, I posted a picture of a flag at half staff. The flag in question stands in the National Cemetery at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on Mayres Heights, the hill Confederates defended and Union soldiers attacked. It was one sided. The Union soldiers were climbing uphill over open ground. The Confederates with their cannons were well hidden in a sunken road. It was a slaughter.
How much you might ask. Well, there are 15,000 soldiers buried at the National Cemetery in Fredericksburg and only 3,000 of them are known. It could literally be called the National Cemetery of the unknown soldier. And it’s sad to think that a great many of those Union soldiers weren’t buried there until after the war, when old graves were dug up to give them a proper resting place.
Such is war. For those of us who have never experienced it directly, it’s a heroic endeavor. For those soldiers, on those days, in that field, however, it was mostly noise, death and destruction. And I’m always amazed, that even knowing what was coming, they still went out and did it, over and over until the generals said enough, let’s go home. And it’s another reason to applaud Jimmy Carter, who remembered the 50,000 boys who died in Vietnam, and took another course to retrieve our hostages.
Recommended reading: The Face of Battle by John Keegan