McBride's Medicated Papers & Other Bottom Delights

Remember the farmboy’s reply to his teacher when asked the difference between involvement and commitment?  After thinking a moment, the lad said, “I don’t know the big words, but when my mom cooks me a ham and egg breakfast, the chicken is in involved, but the pig’s committed.

My wife says in regards to my Civil War reenacting compulsion (compulsion is her word, I call it a hobby), I’m the pig, not the chicken. I can’t argue with her since in the past ten days I’ve travelled about 4,300 miles by car to take part in reenactments on two consecutive weekends in faraway states. In my defense, one of the other guys drove from Utah to Texas to join our carpool to North Carolina.

The two reenactments, at Bentonville, North Carolina and Mobile, Alabama, were the final two legs of my five-year Civil War pilgrimage. I took part in seventeen reenactments in twelve states, each event scheduled150 years to the week after the real battle, and held on or near the real battlefield. I suppose that qualifies as pig-headed commitment.

But now it’s done, and Nita can stop saying, “Really?” when I tell her I’m going to another 150^th anniversary reenactment in a distant state.

I mentioned haversacks last week, the food bag soldiers used to carry. Since we reenactors are weekend faux-warriors, we don’t stuff our haversacks with modern MRE’s or uncooked chunks of beef or bacon, ground cornmeal, or hardtack crackers. Instead, the haversacks become our man purses. Here’s what fell out of mine when I got home from Fort Blakely, Alabama:

A package of “McBride’s Medicated Papers: The Necessity of the Age” (Tissue paper wrapped in a period wrapper copied from the first commercial stacking toilet paper). An unpainted pencil. A clever knife-spoon-fork combo like I had as a Boy Scout. A round tin for my modern Advil, Lipitor, and Zyrtek pills.  A little plastic bottle of eye drops.  My modern glasses.  Modern point and shoot camera.  A red-checked hankie.  A cloth sack of peanuts. Two pieces of hardtack. A squashed wax-wrapped Baby Bell cheese ball.  A little bruised apple.

Bookwise, I’m still stalled at the starting line of the chapter in which Captain McBee leads the Leon Hunters up the side of Little Round Top at Gettysburg. Since Gettysburg was the tipping point of the war for Lee’s army, it’s an important chapter from a historical perspective and I want to get it right.

Moreover, after being unstoppable during a handful of bloody battles the prior year, Gettysburg was the first time that the Texas soldiers under General Hood failed to carry the ground they were ordered to attack.

To make things even worse, in coming up short of their objective, the 5^th Texas Regiment lost over 100 soldiers, 25% of their men, when they were cut off and  captured with the regiment’s wounded colonel near the crest of Little Round Top.

July 2nd was not a good day for the 5th Texas Infantry, and there will be angst among Captain McBee’s company by dusk, that is, once I kick-start my keyboard and write the danged chapter.

Root, Hog, or Die

I’m late again with my weekly post. After the long extended weekend trip to the Civil War reenactment in North Carolina, I stopped in Dallas for three days to paint rooms in our son’s first home, purchased just last week. Pale green bedroom, terra-cotta and pale yellow living room, and medium green kitchen, all colors selected by Ben and his fiancé.

I did pull out the big framed Gettysburg battle print (a Christmas gift from me) from Ben's belongings piled in the garage, and set it on the mantle to add some class to the place. Every living room needs art of Texans with guns, right?

Ben’s fiancé, Meredith, lasted featured as Civil War Private Marvin, in a blog post last November, showed her thanks by having a cold box of wine in the new fridge, ready for “popping,” and pouring into plastic cups after each day’s labor. Like I said, we McBride’s, new and old, are nothing but a class act.

While I was gone a week reenacting and playing Picasso on son Ben’s new walls, grandson Jackson doubled in size, and greeted me last night with a smile to die for.

The reenactment in Bentonville, North Carolina was a good experience. The photo at the top of the blog does a nice job of summarizing the simulated battle on Sunday. There were most likely over a thousand reenactors on each side, and huge crowds of spectators lining two sides of our “arena.”

I went as a Yankee private, joining a battalion of 300 reenactors from all over the nation. I rode from Dallas to NC with men from Oklahoma and Utah, and we all served in a company of men from Missouri, Kansas, and other Midwestern states.

Since our hobby of Civil War reenacting requires blue and gray participants, I’m used to portraying a Yankee soldier, but rarely do I actually march elbow-to-elbow with real Yankees, men from northern states. In spite of warnings about damyankees from my grandparents when I was kid, they are generally good guys, not the commie devils I was led to believe in.

Seriously, it is interesting to come to experience that the frame of reference about the Civil War from those not raised in the old Confederate states, is wholly different from my youth and from most of those in my Texas reenacting group. To reenactors from non-Confederate states, the war is reenacted as a rebellion to be put down, not as a grand assertion of a state’s right to leave the Union. Sometimes it takes a while, but the difference in basic outlook comes through.

The two big battles were different from all my past experiences in that on both days, our side started the show by digging long trenches and low dirt breastworks to fight from. While the spectators watched, we used the few period shovels we had, tin plates, bayonets, and even bare hands to hastily dig into the soft sand soil just like Sherman’s soldiers did 150 years ago.

A popular motto grew among Union soldiers during the latter stages of the war, when both sides knew that the safest place from which to fight was a trench, behind a pile of dirt. Since we were portraying the 10^th Iowa Regiment at the Bentonville reenactment, and we dug both days, the cry seemed especially apt: “Big pig, little pig, Root, Hog, or Die!”

Our battalion camped “campaign” style, meaning no tents, no cots, no ice chests, no camp furniture. Rations were issued and cooked by “messes” of three or four men. The camping highlight for me was entertainment by a duo of period musicians Saturday night in our camp, with libations from a huge wooden keg filled with a local craft-brewery IPA beer. Sweet. Sitting on pine needles leaning against a tree in the dark, drinking from a battered and smoke-stained tin cup, it was a fine “halftime” between the Saturday and Sunday sham battles.

I’m off tonight to another out-of-state reenactment commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, this time in Mobile, Alabama.

 

Going North to North Carolina

I’m a day late with this weekly post, delayed by an unexpected trip out of town to make a hospital visit to a family member in east Texas. The patient is recovering, so that’s good. Moreover, I’m back home, today is St. Patrick’s Day, and I’m drinking a cold green beer brewed in Shiner, Texas, in recognition of all things Irish.

This coming weekend I’m taking part in a big Civil War reenactment in Bentonville, North Carolina.  The battle at Bentonville took place in March, 1865, and was the last fight between the armies of Confederate General Joe Johnston and Union General William Sherman.

The spring of 1865 was a time of forlorn hope for the Confederacy. The Union armies of Grant and Sherman outnumbered the troops of Lee and Johnston by two or three to one and were squeezing the Rebs hard on all fronts and the outcome was inevitable. I’ve not figured out why Confederate President Davis didn’t capitulate before the last tragic spring campaign, but there’s no denying that stubborn pride is often more important to political leaders than are the lives of thousands of soldiers they command. 

I’m going to the reenactment with four other guys from Texas, Oklahoma, and Utah, and we’re going to be part of Company A, 1oth Iowa Infantry – damyankees. I have mixed feelings about wearing blue for this particular reenactment since Bentonville was the last battle of the Sixth Texas Infantry, the regiment in which the Alamo Rifles served. The Alamo Rifles being the group of soldiers from San Antonio who are the subject of my first novel, Whittled Away, I’m feeling a bit disloyal.

Nonetheless, I’m excited about being in the 150^th anniversary reenactment at Bentonville for three reasons. First, I’ve never reenacted in North Carolina, so this trip will be a check off my bucket list of states where I’ve played Civil War soldier, leaving only South Carolina and Florida as relevant states that haven’t been part of my national reenacting playground.

Second, the 10^th Iowa fought in the real battle of Bentonville with a roster of 350 men. Our reenacting 10^th Iowa battalion has 297 men registered, a number close enough to the strength of the real regiment to be unusual in reenacting world.  Even though tens of thousands of Civil War reenactors are scattered across America, our battalions rarely approach the size of the real ones. Maneuvering a battalion of 80 riflemen in a long thread-like line is immensely different from maneuvering a battalion of 300 riflemen, nearly four times the length. Size matters. So this experience has the potential to be exceptional.

As a side note, since we’ll be in North Carolina, it’s worth mentioning that the 26^th North Carolina Infantry Regiment went into the battle at Gettysburg with nearly 800 riflemen, a number that is so large, I wonder how they ever moved and changed formations with any efficiency. Of course, they drilled every day that they were not marching or fighting, which is to say they practiced a lot, and practice matters, too. The 26^th NC lost half its soldiers during the first day’s fighting at Gettysburg, and then lost half of the first-day survivors during Pickett’s Charge on the third day. Gettysburg may have been the 26^th NC’s finest hour, but the glory earned there cost 600 of the 800 young men who marched into Pennsylvania.

Back to the Bentonville reenactment, third, we will be reenacting on part of the actual battleground. Knowing we are on the same turf where the historic soldiers bled and died always adds to the experience, especially at large events. When thousands of reenactors fill your line of sight with long lines of soldiers and cannons, it’s not hard to mentally transport yourself back in time and have some of those “magic moments” reenactors hope for. 

Tomorrow I’ll make a dozen “hardtack” crackers to go in my “haversack” (cloth food bag) along with a couple of links of good Lockhart dried sausage. The hardtack crackers are 3” squares of salted flour, baked until they are hard, and pretty tasteless. The sausage links are smoke-cured as opposed to fire-cooked and start soft and juicy, but turn hard like jerky after a few days at room temperature.

I’ll round out my personal pantry for the weekend with a couple of fresh apples, some dried apricots, Texas peanuts in the shell, and some “Baby Bell” wax-wrapped cheese bits. None of those items need refrigeration for the two days we’ll be snacking out of haversacks, and there’s a chance we’ll be issued some raw food that we can actually cook. I won’t starve, but a meal at the first Cracker Barrel restaurant on the road home will seem like fine dining.

Hopefully, next week I can let you know that I had a great time, even if I was wearing a blue uniforms instead of being a good Texan.

 

 

Red Shirts, Dragons, and Killing A Mockingbird

My writers’ critiquing circle companions are starting to accuse me of mimicking George R Martin, author of the Game of Thrones. I’ve probably invested hundreds of hours reading the lengthy Game of Thrones novels and watching and re-watching the forty episodes of the Game of Thrones TV series. Therefore, I’m taking my friends’ comparisons to Martin as a compliment, even though Game of Thrones is medieval fantasy with dragons, and my novels are Civil War tales without dragons.

This is a good place to mention that dragons appear to have a long abiding place in genre fiction. I fondly remember Anne McCaffrey’s fantasy dragon book series, Dragons of Pern, from three or four decades ago, and more recently I’ve been hooked on the Temeraire Napoleonic War novel series by Naomi Novik. Temeraire is a Chinese-bred war dragon in the service of the British army, a part of the Brits’ “dragon air force,” if you will.

Temeraire speaks and thinks and is quite personable, and is one of the main characters, not just a prized flying horse. It takes a lot of bravado to write an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars to include dragons on both sides, but dang if Ms. Novik doesn’t pull it off well enough to make the series widely popular. I suspect more of my books would be “flying” off the virtual shelves at Amazon if I had included dragons in my Civil War tales, instead of the expected sex, slaves and intrigue-as personified by Faith, Levi, and the evil Lieutenant Samuelson.

Nonetheless, the comparison with George R. Martin wasn’t about dragons, sex, slaves, or intrigue, but was noting that Martin and I both kill off characters with regularity. To which I reply, gosh, I’m writing about the American Civil War, not the American Civil Peace, and lots of people die in wars and war zones. It seems to me that the anguish of killing and dying is an essential element in a good war story. Along with sex, slaves, and, alas, no dragons.

Last week I learned a new literary term that addresses the phenomenon of killing off stock characters to underline the danger of the environment in which the main characters are engaged: Red shirts. The Red Shirts were the security guys in the original Star Trek TV series, the big guys who wore red uniform blouses and often got zapped by the bad guys when they accompanied Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Doctor McCoy to some newly discovered planet. We in the audience generally didn’t even learn the poor guys’ names, as their purpose was just to die near the show’s main characters, to stress that someone has to die, and but it couldn’t be our heroes.

All serial novelists, like I’m working at becoming, have to protect their main character. I still remember as a teenager who read every James Bond paperback as soon as it came out, being shocked when Ian Fleming killed Bond’s new wife – but notably, not Bond himself. Then came George R. Martin, who holds no character sacred. When Eddard Stark’s head tumbled off the chopping block, I probably had to put the book down for a while.

What about the Red Shirts in Whittled Away and the McBee books? I think I’ve at least put names to the poor guys who die early and often. I’ve been through the rosters of the real companies of Confederate infantrymen that are featured in the books and culled names of men that died. I’ve sometimes killed them in the same battle where they died historically. Other times, I need a name for a fictitious scene and pick a fellow who died in the hospital of disease or wounds, and plug his name in.

If someday an old Reb’s descendent writes me all indignant that I maligned his ancestor in my book, I’ll apologize and thank him for buying a copy and reading it so closely.

Unrelated, except that my novels are set in time of open racism, yesterday I watched the movie To Kill A Mockingbird for the first time. I grew up in northeast Texas, which was part of the old south, for sure. Harper Lee, a southern girl who had moved to New York City, won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1962, while I was in junior high school. It was a segregated junior high school, as was the rest of the culture of my youth.

While To Kill A Mockingbird grew to be a staple for classroom reading and study, that was after my years in school, and I’ve never read the novel. No teacher in the schools of Longview, Texas from 1961 when the book was published to immediate national acclaim, until my high school graduation in 1967, used the novel to instruct us on the evils of racism.  I suppose the theme was just too close to home at that time and place.

Therefore, I shouldn’t have been surprised yesterday as I watched the film to think that Harper Lee could just as easily have set the story in 1961, contemporary to when she wrote it, instead of setting the scene in 1931, thirty years earlier. I saw the same unapologetic, pervasive racism in the film that I grew up with in the 1950’s and ‘60’s.

That was over fifty years ago, and things are better now, mostly. With lots of bumps in the road we are moving in the right direction. We’ve left behind most open racist practices that were commonly accepted in fifty years ago, but we aren’t there yet. Not yet.

I’m hoping that young Jackson, my new grandson, will grow up in a culture that looks back in disbelief and disgust at the racism of my growing-up days of the 1950’s and ‘60’s.