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Two veterans of a war that killed an estimated 623,000 Americans shake hands |
IN 1969, two Los Angeles coeds formulated the idea of distributing metal bracelets as a way to remember American prisoners and GIs missing in action during the Vietnam War. Each bracelet bore the name of a single POW/MIA, and those who donned one did so with the understanding that they would wear it until "their" serviceman came home or was confirmed dead. More than 1,700 Americans who fought in Vietnam remain unaccounted for. As time passed and hope for resolution of their fates all but died, the bracelets began to disappear. But even 20 years after the war ended, a few Americans continued to wear theirs; surely some still do.
Long before Vietnam, at the end of the American Civil War, the sides exchanged prisoners, but still the whereabouts of thousands of Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs were unknown. Some would stay that way. They had died at places such as the Wilderness, blown to bits by artillery shells or charred beyond recognition in the fires that swept that brush-thick battlefield. "And some there be"--Shelby Foote quotes Ecclesiasticus to introduce his magnificent "The Civil War: A Narrative"--"which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born."
SENSE OF THE AWESOME
To remember in spirit those unrememberable in specifics is one reason governments set aside battlefields as inviolable memorials. Another is to certify beyond argument something profound happened here. Normandy. Shiloh. The Alamo. Bunker Hill. Thermopylae. Verdun. Pause and reflect, because you would live in a different kind of world without the sacrifices made on this ground.
Many things profound happened in May 1864 during the battle of the Wilderness. There, 61,000 Confederates under Robert E. Lee--ragged, almost skeletal men, some without shoes--played death for three days with 100,000 Union soldiers under Ulysses S. Grant, men who entered forbidding woods in enemy country to dislodge a deadly and determined foe. The Wilderness was the opening stanza in Grant's Overland Campaign, which ended at Appomattox Courthouse, causing the destruction of one kind of society and the creation of another "best defined perhaps," writes Foote, "by the change in number of a simple verb. In formal as in common speech, abroad as well as on this side of its oceans, once the nation emerged from the crucible of that war, 'the United States are' became 'the United States is.'" And that unification changed the course of human history on this planet.
Monday night the Orange Board of Supervisors is likely to vote, after a public hearing, on a special-use permit that would allow construction of a Wal-Mart Supercenter and associated big-box stores on 51.6 acres that were part of the Battle of the Wilderness and that lie near the formal battlefield park. Motley opponents--historians, preservationists, out-of-state legislators, in-state public officials (Gov. Kaine, Sen. Webb, House Speaker Bill Howell, state Sen. Creigh Deeds), actors, plain folk--want the board to deny the permit and find a less sensitive site for Wal-Mart and its retail retinue. Their voices are important. But they are not most important.
The Union and Confederate armies suffered around 29,000 casualties in the Wilderness--by coincidence, almost exactly the population of today's Orange County. If each American who died, bled, or disappeared in the Wilderness maelstrom audibly called out from the consecrated earth for remembrance, he would find an Orange resident, all his own, to hear his message.
Wal-Mart cheaply sells much useful merchandise; the location it seeks would be convenient to most of the county. The store would generate taxes translatable to infrastructure improvements and public amenities. Of these things there can be no doubt.
COMMON DEBT
But Consumer and Taxpayer are not the totality of human roles. Many Orange countians can tell of forebears who fought honorably for Dixie or for Mr. Lincoln (or could tell if they would investigate their family lineage). Those with no ancestors in the Civil War can still appreciate the valorous example and living heritage of which they, as Americans, fortunately partake.
The debt goes on. It is not too much to say that the chains of human slavery received their first chisel bite in the Wilderness where began the steady decimation of the Army of Northern Virginia, effectively the protector of the wicked institution. And the freedom from serious want that most living Americans enjoy flows from the industrial boom that would soon make the reunified nation ("the United States is") the world's commercial powerhouse.
Listen, Orange. Don't you hear?
The public hearing on the proposed Wal-Mart store will begin at 7 p.m. The result is supposedly foregone: The board will grant the special-use permit. Daniel Webster faced no greater task in persuading the devil's cutthroat jury than defenders of the Wilderness face in turning around some of these supervisors. But the duty of the citizen is not to win; he or she fulfills it in the effort.
From Gordonsville and Locust Grove, from the town of Orange to Barboursville, let every county beneficiary of heroes' striving turn out to oppose this location for a shopatropolis. Let county members of the NAACP join with Sons of Confederate Veterans, small businesspersons with school teachers, yellow-dog Democrats with run-mad Republicans, natives with transplants to say, "Somewhere else." Let them leave no doubt, however their representatives vote, what an aroused Orange County thinks about this ill-conceived plan.
It is a time to kindle that spirit of the 20-year bracelet wearers, the spirit of those who don't forget, who repay sacrifice with fidelity, the only acceptable tender for gifts of blood. Confirm Ecclesiasticus: "But these were merciful men, whose righteousness has not been forgotten. With their seed shall continually remain a good inheritance, and their children are within the covenant."
