Gettysburg

Gettysburg

Harry Buschman

Late in the afternoon he walked out to the site of Little Round Top.

He went alone.

It is a bleak Sunday afternoon in late November and Dave Scanlon has to go back to Allentown for his final training in survival fighting tomorrow morning.

He’s standing there now, at the edge of a bleak brown field in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The grass is brown now, but in summertime it’s a lush green––blue grass they call it. The sheep and the dairy cows keep it trimmed close and neat. One would think they worked for the National Park Service.

He’s thinking of three days ... 145 years ago in late June when nearly fifty thousand Americans were killed and wounded here. Dave’s great grandfather was one of the wounded. He was a Union soldier with a mustache and an ill-fitting uniform. He carried a rifle nearly as tall as he was––taller even, when the bayonet was fitted.

Every time Dave comes home for a weekend he finds the time to come out here to this field. Little Round Top Is an inconspicuous mound of earth, it probably didn’t have a name then, but it has always been customary for men in battle to put a name and a date to places where their people were killed.

When Dave was little, his grandfather told him all about the Civil War and how strange it was that men who looked alike, spoke the same language and prayed in the same churches killed each other––cursing each other as they fell. War is like that, he said. “It turns men into animals. It’s much easier to do that than turn animals into men.”

Dave is older now, he’s a civil engineering junior at Lehigh University. He’ll finish his final year when he comes home from his tour in Afghanistan with the Pennsylvania National Guard. He’s wondering about war and why it comes again and again to visit each generation; each time more deadly ... as if it must practice to be perfect.