Useless Battles Cost Many Lives-Civil War

[L Verge]

I have told this story before to some of you. I was teaching during the Viet Nam war and had a 9th grader named Ronnie. We competed with each other to see who could get on the other one's nerves the fastest each day. Ronnie squeaked through to the tenth grade by the skin of his teeth, and I lost track of him when he went to high school.

As soon as he turned 17, he got his parents' permission to join the Army. One day, a knock came on my classroom door, and I opened it to find Ronnie in dress uniform standing there. He had come to see me after three years to tell me that he wished he had paid attention to what I tried to tell him about life because the Army DIs had taught him the same things the hard way. He just wanted to thank me for putting up with him and to tell me that he was leaving for Nam in a few days.

The next time I saw Ronnie was about six weeks later. He left Nam in a body bag, and I received a call from his family that they would like me to come to the funeral. That was one of the toughest funerals I have ever been to. The only time I ever visited The Wall, I started crying all over again - for Ronnie and for a classmate from high school and college, Jimmy Graham, who was killed while leading his platoon through enemy territory. Although severely wounded, Jimmy stayed behind to keep the enemy at bay and to be with a dying comrade while the rest of the men could escape. Jimmy won the Medal of Honor posthumously.

When you stop and think of the sheer numbers of casualties in the Civil War compared to our other wars, it is staggering. Almost an entire generation of young men wiped out in four years. My students had a hard time grasping the concept of how many people comprise 600,000 plus souls.