Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
April 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
April 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 2
Like his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before him, Dave was a Michigan farmer. His great-grandfather had emigrated from Poland in 1X61, briefly worked in the Detroit area, then enlisted in the 24th Michigan. Months later, at the Battle of Gettysburg, Dave’s great-grandfather saw his regiment shot to pieces. On McPhcrson Ridge the black-hatted men of the 24th fought the 26th North Carolina Regiment to a standstill, but at dusk only ninety-nine of the nearly five hundred men of the 24th remained. Dave’s great-grandfather was one of the survivors.
Dave never went to college; he never even graduated from high school. But he read a lot, and he gave a lot of thought to his heritage. And although it was all hut impossible to escape the demands of his dairy farm, he had managed to visit the Gettysburg Battlefield twenty-two times.
Last spring the owner of a local bed and breakfast called to verify that I was the West Pointer now guiding on the battlefield. Then she told me about Dave and added that because of rapidly failing health, he felt this would be his last trip East. Would I guide him? Of course.
For nearly four hours Dave and I refought the battle, touring Gulp’s Hill and Little Round Top and the Wheat Field, and then exploring less familiar precincts. He knew everything worth knowing about the 24th Michigan, and along the way we also talked about the American soldier, about what ground combat really is like, and about the American past.
“What I don’t understand,” he said at one point, “is why they fought so hard. They were all Americans. This is the best country in the world. They must have felt that way too. How could they fight each other so hard? What could have been so important that six hundred thousand men had to die for it?”
I offered the historians’ answers: slavery, states’ rights, economic sectionalism. But we both knew it went deeper— into the heart and soul of what is an American.
Our Civil War is encapsulated in the three terrible days at Gettysburg in 1863, and tens of thousands of Americans are drawn there; drawn again and again, generation after generation. Every visitor seems to gain something from the battlefield and its story. And every visitor can give something in return. Dave showed me that; so have hundreds of other Americans I’ve met at Gettysburg.
After a lifelong military career, with infantry service in Korea and Vietnam, I am fortunate enough to be doing exactly what I want to do. At the Gettysburg National Military Park in south-central Pennsylvania we have a unique and unusual institution: a corps of guides licensed by the federal government to accommodate the throngs of visitors. Unique because Gettysburg is the only national battlefield so serviced; unusual