History Lesson

Fifty-one thousand. That's not a sellout for most major sporting venues, but it's a pretty good crowd. It's also the number of soldiers who died at the Battle of Gettysburg. Not Berlin. Not Basra. Not Kabul. This one was fought in Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, just up the road from Baltimore. One hundred and fifty years later, the loss of life over a three day period still feels overwhelming.
Little Round Top, Culp's Hill and the appropriately named Cemetery Hill were some of the spots that saw action over those three days in the summer of 1863. As turning points go, this was a decisive moment for the United States on both sides of the Mason Dixon line.
I've been there. In my youth, my family took a trip back east in our much-traveled station wagon. This was no breezy jaunt to Disneyland. This was a voyage into the darkness. I remember touring the battlefields under the direction of the cassette tapes that gave us point to point descriptions of the action. I remember wishing my dad would spring for the extra fun tickets that would take us up into the observation tower that loomed over the site.
The tower has been taken down, and preservationists have worked to restore the surrounding area to the way it was a century and a half ago. Many of the local motels have been removed or relocated as part of this effort. This probably means that the place where we stayed has been returned to rolling hills or lush thicket. It was in the bathroom of one of these quaint motor courts that I found myself, in the middle of the night, as sick as I can ever remember being, before or since. My father said, "It sounded like you were puking up your toenails." It's a mental image I haven't been able to shake after forty years.
Looking back, it may have been the only way I had to react to the history I was being told. More than fifty thousand men died trying to preserve or defend their vision of the country which hadn't yet reached its own hundredth birthday. It would be the bloodiest days in America's military history, and we were fighting each other. It would be some months later, after the Confederate Army had been pushed back but still two years from surrender, that Abraham Lincoln showed up to dedicate a portion of the battlefield to those who gave their lives: "It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
In 2013, reading those words makes my stomach feel much better.