His Mama Said Okay

His mama said it’s okay that I put this photo of Jackson in this particular blog post. 

Bless her for not minding that the kid shill for his granddaddy’s new book. I think it’s the single raised eyebrow and the dark solemn eyes.  Even if he's too young to read it, the boy just knows this is a fine story. After all, there is a cannon on the cover.

He’s holding the proof copy of my just-finished second book in the Captain McBee trilogy.  This one takes the war, Faith and John’s dicey romance, and the complexities of Levi’s servitude, through 1863, including the game-changer battle at Gettysburg. 

The story also sweeps in a couple of historical figures, Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederacy’s enigmatic Secretary of State, and Captain Champ Ferguson, a murderous stinker who led a band of partisan rangers on the Tennessee-Kentucky border.

Jumping with a purpose: For ten years now, during one weekend in October, I’ve stood by the tombstone of a different Confederate veteran buried in our city cemetery and as each man's spirit, given a first-person account of his life, including his war story. It’s called “Speaking With the Dead,” and it’s a popular fund-raising event put on by our county historical commission. 

Here’s a photo of me from a couple of spirits back when I was telling how my guy searched for buried barrels of whiskey while in Louisiana. 

He was among a group of thirsty Texas soldiers who used their musket ramrods to probe the ground in the barn of a guy known to distill spirits. They soon “knocked on wood.” They dug up the barrels and replanted them in their camp where the creative soldiers took turns during the night laying on the ground and sipping the distilled spirits through cut hollow reeds. Amazing what young soldiers remembered when they got home and talked about the war.

Earlier this week, I was asked to help promote the tour by giving one of the spirit speeches from years past to a group of about thirty local ladies at the library.

During the Q and A session after the program, a writer friend in the audience mentioned that I have a new book, Redeeming Honor. Then another lady asked the title of the first book in the trilogy. 

I had a very embarrassing senior moment when the word “Tangled” in Tangled Honor hid behind a big rock somewhere in my brain. The best I could do was “Something” Honor, until my friend remembered and shouted out “Tangled!”  Not the best sales pitch I’ve ever made, for sure.

Maybe Jackson will do better than his granddad. Here’s the link to the Amazon page where Redeeming Honor and my other two Civil War novels can be bought. 

http://www.amazon.com/Redeeming-Honor-1863-Philip-McBride-ebook/dp/B0150ECJJA

I do hope you’ll consider buying a paperback copy or the Kindle ebook version. Thanks.

Indisputable Honor and Questionable Honor

I chose the short 5-letter term “honor” as the common denominator in the titles of all three of my Captain McBee novels. From what I’ve read, all wars seethe with honor, as brave soldiers cast aside actions that would preserve their lives, to instead do things that hasten their deaths.

 Last Friday was 9-11, America’s 21^st century Pearl Harbor. Flags flew at half-mast all over the country. On this fourteenth anniversary, I only read one article about the day, but it was a story of absolutely indisputable honor. 

 The short version: Like Pearl Harbor, our military was caught with our pants down on 9-11. There were NO Air Force jets armed and ready to take off from any air field around Washington, DC. to defend our national capital from a surprise air attack. We had lots of radar, but no planes on the runaway, "locked and loaded," ready for a fast take-off to meet an unexpected threat.

 There were two F-16’s with fuel to fly, but with no ammunition or missiles loaded. That would take time, and word came in that a fourth high-jacked jet airliner was headed towards Washington. The pilots of the two F-16’s already knew of the attacks on the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon.

 These two unarmed jet fighters would be our only on-the-spot first-responders. An Air Force National Guard colonel and a young Lieutenant who were the pilots of the two F-16’s quickly put on their flying gear. Before they climbed into their respective jets, knowing their planes' only weapons were the planes themselves, the colonel said to the lieutenant, “I’ll take the cockpit.” She replied, “I’ll take the tail.” 

 That’s it. They took off with the indisputably honorable intent to kamikaze into a jet airliner full of innocents to prevent it from crashing into a target in Washington, DC.

 I hope you caught that I wrote that the lieutenant pilot was a “she.” A petite young blonde in her early twenties fresh out of Air Force flight school, one of America's first generation of female fighter pilots, coolly telling her CO, “I got the tail.”

 To the credit of the American spirit and in their own act of indisputable honor, the civilian passengers on the last high-jacked plane solved their own problem, hastening their own deaths by doing so, by crashing the plane into the Pennsylvania countryside. The lieutenant and colonel didn’t have to give what President Lincoln dubbed in his Gettysburg address, “their last full measure” of honor. A handful of other patriots beat them to it. 

 It would be nice to think that all soldiers acted with indisputable honor, but we're all human, so that doesn't always happen. To offset the valor of the two F-16 pilots and the passengers of the fourth airliner on 9-11, here’s a Civil War story I first read this past weekend.

Below is a report of an interview printed in the Houston Post newspaper in 1909, forty-seven years after the Second Battle of Manassas,  which was fought just outside Washington, DC. My thanks to Joe Owen for posting a piece of the article  on Facebook, then sending me the a transcript of the entire thing.

 Private Lawrence Daffan (1845-1907) of the Fourth Texas Infantry was interviewed by his daughter Katie Daffan some 40 years after the battle of Second Manassas (Bull Run) that was fought on August 30, 1862.

 She prefaces her record of the interview with this paragraph, which as a Civil War addict and novelist always looking for the personal perspective, makes me drool wishing I could have been there.

 “I have heard my father and his comrades, in our home, many times renew the record of Hood’s Texas brigade, when animated, spirited discussions would ensue.  Though each was present, in the flesh, upon the battlefield, each an ardent participant, there were sometimes as many opinions as there were voices.”

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in that home during one of those discussions among the veterans.

 Here’s an excerpt of Lawrence Daffan’s recollections of the great battle which he experienced as a 17-year-old teenage private.

 "We rallied at Young’s branch. I looked up the hill which we had descended and the hill was red with uniforms of the Zouaves. They were from New York.

We ascended the hill out of Young’s branch, charged a battery of six guns, supported by a line of Pennsylvania infantry. This battery was near enough to use on us grape shot and canister.

 As we came near to it one of the guns was pointed directly at my company and lanyard strung. Our captain commanded company G to right and left oblique from it. I was on the right and with a few others went into Company H. Company H received a load of canister which killed four or five men.

I was immediately with Lieutenants Jones and Ransom of that company who were both killed right at my feet. I stepped over both of them. Capt Hunter, now living, was also shot down at that time. Most of the company were my schoolmates.

This last shot threw smoke and dust all over me, and the shot whizzed on both sides of me. Lieutenant Jones was shot in the head and feet, but I was not touched. When the smoke cleared away we had their guns, and they were so hot I couldn’t bear my hands on them. I then fired one shot at this retreating infantry which the rest of the brigade had been engaged with.

This wound up that day’s engagement for us, except the Fifth Texas. As their regiment and their colors were carried about five miles after the retreating enemy.”

 Sounds pretty brave and honorable, doesn’t it. But…

 Private Daffan flat out said that his captain saw just one cannon aimed right at his company and they were close enough for the cannon to be firing the highly dreaded grapeshot or canister -- both being cannon-sized loads of buckshot or golf ball-sized steel balls. Extremely deadly and greatly feared by infantry on the attack.

 So the company captain ordered his men to march at a diagonal (oblique) which would put his men behind the soldiers in the companies to either side of his company. He made the order for his men to essentially use the soldiers in the companies marching next to his in the regiment’s battleline as human shields. He could have had his company lie down or kneel to lessen the size of his men as targets, or he could have just ignored the deadly incoming cannon fire.

 Daffan went on to tell his daughter that five men in the company that shielded him died from the single cannon blast, including two lieutenants, who would have been in the rear of their company formation to keep faltering men going forward, but in front of Daffan, since he says he stepped over their bodies.

 In my way of thinking the unnamed captain of Company G hardly chose an honorable action for his men. Instead, he reeacted to the threat with very questionable honor. Quite a contrast to the 9-11 pilots.

In fact, if the commanders of the companies next to Co. G were aware of what happened, I’m surprised the Co. G captain was not called out to a duel or maybe even a court-marshal for the order he gave his men to move behind the companies to either side of them.Not all soldiers are heroes, not all officers give honorable commands in the heat of battle. Not all patriots wear military uniforms, as the firemen and EMS first responders at the Twin Towers demonstrated. Many patriots were no uniform at all, as the passengers on the fourth high-jacked airliner showed the world. Yet, we are indeed all God’s children, usually doing the best we can.  And on this Monday morning a few days past the anniversary of the tragedies and sacrifices of 9-11, it’s still a good day to say, “God Bless America.”

 

She had me at "Can I have a hug?"

I wrote this post three weeks ago and couldn’t decide if it was too personal or too whiny to publish on my blog. The scale tipped when our pastor preached about the boundaries. When I was young, compartmentalizing the different facets of my life and setting boundaries wasn’t all that hard. I kept work stuff at work, family stuff at home. As an educator, tough love was the rule of the day. Thirty years later, things have blurred, and I think this post is about how aging tends to muddle up boundaries.  Here it is:

I’m a grandfather, a recent change of status which I admit I’ve been unabashedly milking in my blog posts. And I’m a southern man who’s mastered the art of the a-sexual side-hug. It’s a handy tool for one’s social toolkit, at least in my part of the country, where hugs often substitute for handshakes.

I wrote a blog post a couple of months ago about my volunteer work with the local Salvation Army chapter-“service unit” it’s called officially. In a nutshell, we give away locally donated money to local folks who are in need of financial assistance to pay their bills. It’s more complicated than that, but not too much.

For the past several years, I’ve been one of the volunteers who staff our Salvation Army “office hours” each month. It’s a time when anyone can walk in off the street and ask for $100 to help with their basic everyday needs. Needs like paying their electric bill or rent, buying food, gas, or baby supplies.  We have some practical safeguards to prevent abuse and over-dependency on our charity. Nonetheless, I often hold my proverbial nose as I write an assistance check for some of our “regulars” who in their own way game our system.

But don’t we all game our personal finances as much as our integrity and the hidden rules we live by allow for? So I try to cut people some slack.

Last week, a young woman wearing a McDonald’s employee’s uniform walked in. It was 11:15 and her first words were that her boss told her to be back by noon. She was new to the job. Like many first-timers she apologized for seeking financial assistance, and like some folks, before she had been seated at the table for more than a few seconds, she gushed - not crying, but simply telling me in a rush of words of the particulars of her hard life as it stood that day.

I get impatient with whiners. I have to bite my tongue when young women with three or four young children from three or four fathers tell me they’re not getting any child support, but need help. You can imagine how that tune goes.

The difference with this gal was she had only one child, a two-year old daughter, and after about every third sentence, she paused from speaking of the hard road she traveled, and said, “But I’m strong. I’m a good person. A good mother. I’m going to make it.” Then she’d tell me about another brick in the wall that was keeping her from financial independence. Her manner and emotions were bouncing up and down like a paddle ball on a rubber band.

I was a high school principal for fourteen years, and I’ve heard my share of sob stories. I think I can usually read a con, recognize a gamer. I can be a hard-nosed SOB, but I also confess to having a soft heart, sometimes a push-over heart. Also, Nita and I raised two sons, no little girls. I believe those men who say, “You can’t scare me, I raised two daughters.” I know I can be had by doe eyes and a trembling voice. So I keep my own wall up between us during such interviews.

This young woman interrupted her own story at about the point of telling me her husband was in prison in Mississippi for murder, but he says he didn’t do it, and her mother is …not so helpful, and her grandmother in Iowa has sent her all the money she can afford, and her roommate is doing something or the other that’s bad.

Then, without warning, sitting primly across the table from me and my half-written Salvation Army assistance check, in the middle of her litany of woes, she just blurted out, “Can I have a hug? I could really use a hug.” Well, hell. She had me.

I swallowed. I looked at her. I decided in a flash this was her way of asking an old gray-haired bespectacled man to pray for her, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask in those words. I also figured she probably did indeed need a real bear hug from someone who would just affirm by a big squeeze that she was OK.

So, l said, “Sure,” got up and gave her my best socially-correct sideways hug, no bear hug. And I gave her a Salvation Army check to help pay her overdue electric bill, and a grocery store gift card to buy a birthday present and diapers for her daughter. Maybe she used the card for beer and cigarettes. There’s no way for me to know, but my intuition says she didn’t.

There’s no Civil War point to this post. No writer’s “Ah Hah” instant of revelation. This one is just me including you in my wondering if she had me in a good way at “Can I have a hug?” or if she conned me and will be back again for another hit of charity the next time we open the door, telling me of another lost job or lost apartment or messed-up roommate.

The young lady is certainly one of the countless bouncing pebbles in the river of single moms who are willing minimum-wage slaves in America’s cold-blooded fast-food industry. One side of me suspects she’ll cope by moving along to a new tattooed boyfriend, new empty promises of affection, other shabby house trailers piled high with litter.

But she told me, “I need a hug.” I really wish she hadn’t done that. Maybe I would not still be worrying about her and her little daughter a week later. Maybe she is strong, resilient and a good mother like she self-proclaimed. Maybe she will keep on keeping on making things a little better month by month for herself and her daughter. Maybe she will pull herself up. I sure hope so.

Don't Worry Nate or I'm Off to Look For America

Sometime earlier this year I wrote a blog post saying modern backpackers are pussies compared to the average Civil War soldier on campaign carrying his gear and food without any aluminum tent poles, nylon tents, freeze-dried food packages, goose-down vests, or fancy thick soled light weight boots.  In 1863 hikers and soldiers had wool, wood, canvas, and leather to make all the stuff they carried and wore.

Today, I’m reversing myself and applauding a young couple who “ain’t no pussies.”  They proved that by bicycling 3,000 miles over 62 days from Boston, Mass. to Sunnyside, a little farming town in Washington state.  My hat is off to Nik Walther and Molly Heyman, who resigned from their jobs in Boston, she as a special education teacher and he as a brewer at Harpoon Brewery, stored their belongings, and crossed America on two high-tech vehicles whose only motors were the couple’s legs.

Nik grew up in Lockhart next door to us and his parents are close friends of three decades now. In the summer of 2014 we spent a great week in Boston to attend Nik and Molly’s wedding in a park.

Even though I’m stuck these days vicariously living in the 19^th century through writing about and reenacting the Civil War, I’m forgiving Nik and Molly their use of nylon and high-strength light-weight steel bikes and other such modernisms, because they rode roads and crossed states that didn’t exist in the 1860’s.

Thanks to the wonders of digital technology they blogged several times a week and kept their family and friends engaged with their trip.  Their blog is “Don’t Worry Nate” on Google’s blogpost. Here’s the link if you are curious enough to read a bit about their trip to find America.  Simon and Garfunkle would be proud of them.

http://dontworrynate.blogspot.com/

Nik and Molly camped some nights in parks, one night behind a gas station in a town in Wyoming. They stayed with extended family, friends, and friends of friends, and begged showers. They discovered craft breweries and local beers in every state crossed. Mostly, they pedaled and pedaled and pedaled and pedaled through towns and cities, forests and crop land, over America’s tallest mountains, and across wide, wide prairies. I’m impressed. You’d have to be dead not to be impressed.

The end days of their trip were through an area in Idaho where forest fires are a major issue. The threats of the fires caused them to eventually get off their bikes and hitch a ride in a local couple’s pick-up truck when the smoke was too heavy to continue pedaling and breathing, even with their paper masks.  

They didn’t write if they ever saw flames in the trees, but if they had blogged that they did, or posted such a photo, both mothers would have been unduly stressed. So the question of “Just how close were you to a forest fire?” will have to be answered later. Probably with cold Texas beers in hand.

And now I’m compelled to go back forty-three years to 1972 and mention Nita’s and my trip across America when we were newly-weds and young people still listened to Simon and Garfunkle music.

A month after our wedding we took off on our version of pedaling across America, except we did it using the gas pedal of a 1964 Chevy pick-up with a homemade plywood camper shell on the back painted blue and green on the outside and yellow and orange on the inside. Our families thought we were nuts because we too had quit our jobs for the trip and I’d not yet finished my college degree.

We probably traveled some of the same roads that Nik and Molly rode. We stopped in parks and the driveways of extended family to sleep in the camper.  Both couples traveled through Yellowstone National Park and marveled at the geysers and wildlife. I won't mention that in 1972 Nita slipped a Fig Newton cookie through a crack in the truck window to a bear while our dog went beserk.

We enjoyed borrowed bathrooms and showers as much as Nik and Molly did. Well, probably not. We both took about two months to complete our trips.  I expect Nik and Molly will have the same warm lifelong memories of their trip to find America as Nita and I still have, and they'll have better looking legs.

In 1972, we came back to Texas and worked in Nita’s mom’s family café in Dallas to earn enough seed money to return to Austin and resume our pre-trip lives. To the surprise of my parents, I did finish college.

I expect Nik and Molly will flirt with moving to one of the wonderful places they discovered on their pedaling journey, and might even return to Colorado or South Carolina to try a new life. Or the siren call of Boston may pull them back. Because even after two months of discovering America, there’s no place like home.

There’s no Civil War or novel writing point to this post. Maybe next week.

This week I read a John Grisham thriller, The Racketeer, and kept thinking, damn, this guy can write.

Channeling Scarlett?

On Monday evening Nita and I shared a celebratory bottle of champagne as we stared at the completed manuscript of Redeeming Honor. It is still a draft which will be edited, but every chapter is written. I don’t know if I’m getting better as a novelist, but I’m getting faster. I wrote this third book in just nine months, compared to sixteen months for the second one, and about four years to write my first novel.

Regardless of the number of months spent at the keyboard, I still get a warm feeling of accomplishment when I finish. Holding and looking at the first paperback proof copy of a new McBride novel is even better than standing across the street, looking at my freshly mowed lawn on a hot summer day, drenched in sweat and enjoying a cold one.

Last night, while Nita was gone to her ladies’ book club gathering, I watched a film made in 1989, about filming Gone With the Wind, which premiered in Atlanta, Georgia in 1939.  I have mixed feelings about GWTW, the novel and the epic movie.

First, I read 90% of the book while I was in high school, but quit when I finally had had enough of Scarlett’s self-absorbed bitchiness. Second, when the film was re-released in 1966 and played at the Arlene Theater in Longview, Texas, where I grew up, I went to see it. It was my first date with the cute girl who sat at my table in our high school art class. Her name was Cheryl and we never had a second date, probably because I fell asleep during the movie and my lolling head drooled on her shoulder before she elbowed me awake. It’s cute when six-month-old grandson Jackson drools, wasn’t so much when seventeen-year-old Phil did.

Later, in 1999, I worked a few days as a movie extra in my Confederate soldier reenacting duds for a new movie being filmed in central Texas, American Outlaws. It’s not GWTW, but it is a fun, entertaining movie. No Scarlett. Anyway, I heard the man who was handing out stock Confederate uniforms from the big costume trailer tell another worker that these uniforms hadn’t been out of the warehouse in Hollywood since they were cleaned after the filming of Gone With the Wind.  I don’t know if he was joking or not, but the two long racks held dozens and dozens of Confederate uniforms, each hanging in their own plastic bag and each one was artfully “ragged” in appearance. My mind immediately went back to my unfortunate date with Cheryl, and the one movie scene I was awake to see and remember: The heartrending panoramic view of the hundreds and hundreds of dead and wounded Confederate soldiers laid out in rows in Atlanta. It was easy to imagine that some of those extras wore these same costumes sixty years before.

That's not a movie poster of American Outlaws, but is a frame from the movie of a real actor wearing one of the possible GWTW costumes, with me wearing my own Rebel suit right behind him. Son Ben was working at the local movie theater here in Lockhart when American Outlaws came out, and the movie owner clipped a couple of frames from the copy of the film he received and made a gift of them.  Nice guy. 

With that background regarding GWTW, I’ve worried for two years that my Faith Samuelson character channels Scarlett O’Hara. That bothers me because I’ve intended the McBee novels to more in the vein of Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe series, not GWTW, and while I appreciate Scarlett’s gritty survival instincts, I didn’t like her.

By the end of the first McBee book I wasn’t too sure where Faith stood on my mental “Scarlett-meter.” By the end of Redeeming Honor, and after seeing the documentary about GWTW last night, I’m feeling better that I haven’t created a copycat Scarlett. I’ve decided they merely share a few of the attractive personality traits exhibited by magnetic young women. Never mind that both books are set in the south during the Civil War and both women have “men issues.” Never mind that GWTW was a phenomenal best seller and my books are barely selling.

Now, in the third of the McBee series, I need to make sure Faith doesn’t drift into Scarlett-like bad girl selfishness, while she copes with similar end-of-the-war survival needs that Scarlett faced in GWTW.

And if you have read this far and concluded Phil’s being pretty uppity to compare his writing and characters to Gone With the Wind, you’re right. The world won’t be going gaga over McBride’s Civil War novels like people were over GWTW in the 1930’s. But my grandchildren will be able to pick up a stack of tattered paperbacks someday and say, “Damn, granddaddy wrote these. I wonder if they’re any good?” They might even read one or two of them. And if they do, they’re going to like Faith.

The Comanches' Gettysburg

Today marks the 175^th anniversary of the Texas Comanches’ “Gettysburg.”  The Battle of Plum Creek, fought right here near little Lockhart, where I live, was the beginning of the end for the most feared Native Americans of the southern plains. 

Like General Lee, the Comanche’s had great confidence in their abilities and their reputation. In their pride, like Lee, they simply reached too far from their secure home base in the hill country of Central Texas. 

Here is what the “Today In Texas History” daily e-mail message has to say about it:

“On this day in 1840, Gen. Felix Huston, Col. Edward Burleson, and others, including Ben McCulloch, fought a running battle with a large party of Comanche Indians. The battle of Plum Creek occurred as a result of the Council House Fight, in which a number of Comanche leaders were killed. Chief Buffalo Hump led a retaliatory attack down the Guadalupe valley east and south of Gonzales. 

The band numbered perhaps as many as 1,000, including the families of the warriors, who followed to make camps and seize plunder. The Comanches swept down the valley, plundering, stealing horses, and killing settlers, and sacked the town of Linnville. The Texans' volunteer army caught up with the Indians on Plum Creek, near present-day Lockhart, on August 11 and soundly defeated them the next day.”

That summary is scant on details, some of which are humorous, some sad, some gruesome. A fine historian, Donaly Brice wrote “the book” about the Battle of Plum Creek in 1987, back before the internet changed everything. Now there are primary sources on the net in addition to the sources Donaly had access to, but his book is still the one to read.

The first chapter of Tangled Honor is my version of the battle seen through the eyes of young John McBee, who was then a new immigrant to Texas. I had great fun with the story, interweaving historical and fictional characters.

As to some of the details missing in the summary set forth by the Texas Day by Day website, here’s a sampling:

The 200 or so Texans were aided by 13 Tonkawa Indians, who ran next to the white men’s horses over thirty miles from Bastrop to Plum Creek where the militia caught up to the Comanches.  The ‘Tonks’ were recorded as having indulged in a bit of ceremonial cannibalism after the battle, fallen Comanches being the main course.

One well-to-do captive woman wore a whalebone corset which apparently frustrated the braves who initially tried to ‘have their way’ with the lady, so they tied her to a tree. When the battle began, an Indian warrior shot the woman with an arrow, but the corset provided enough of a shield to keep the arrow from fatally injuring her. She was rescued.

During the raid on Linville on the Texas coast, the Comanches plundered a warehouse, finding a plethora of finery, much of which they wore or used for the rest of their raid. Braves and chiefs are recorded as wearing top-hats, carrying silk parasols, and one chief wore a black cutaway coat backwards. Long brightly colored ribbons were tied to horse manes and tails as decoration.

The number of Comanche braves, most likely over 500, might well have been sufficient to reverse the outcome of the hotly fought battle, except that most of the warriors were more interested in driving their herds of stolen horses and mules into the hill country than they were in turning to fight the Texan pursuers.

The Texans recovered a substantial herd of livestock, which they deemed proper payment for their valiant military service, as they divided the recovered mules and horses among themselves.

The running battle covered several miles, including a determined stand by a group of warriors in a grove of live oak trees that still provide shade to cattle just over a mile from where I’m sitting at home writing this.

I’ve not been criticized for starting the first McBee Civil War novel with a huge Indian battle, but I confess it was a stretch. Yet, the Plum Creek Battle story did introduce my main character as a youth twenty years before he became a middle-age (overage) Confederate infantry captain. And it grounded the book in Texas, even if the rest of the action happens in Virginia and other states up that way.

Finally, to end this post with a little crude humor, about ten years ago our local school district built a new elementary school not far off the path of the battle, and had a contest to name the new school. It wound up being “Bluebonnet Elementary,” a fine, if unoriginal, Texas name. I’m a bit hurt, though, that my ideas never got a fair shake. Nobody else seemed to want a school named “Tonkawa Feast Elementary,” “Whalebone Salvation Elementary,” or even a more general “Dead Comanche Elementary.” What a loss. Just think of the storytelling that would have followed for years as teachers, parents, and students explained to others what the name meant.

This week I finished reading The Fateful Lightning, a fine Jeff Shaara historical novel about General Sherman’s march through Georgia. It’s a well written and somewhat disturbing account of the punishing “total war” that Sherman’s army levied upon the civilian population of three southern states. It’s the sort of story that makes it easy to understand why some southern memories have lasted far beyond the lives of the participants.

It’s over a 100 degrees every day now in these parts. Hope your thermometer is being a little kinder where you are.

Old Soldiers' Letters, Modern Prisoners' Books

It’s breakfast time and I’m sitting in a motel room in north Atlanta, here visiting family to celebrate my mom’s ninetieth birthday. In my e-mail in-basket this morning sat a message from a lady in San Antonio who I’ve never met. I don’t know if she’s seventeen or seventy, but she’s an e-mail friend with whom I’ve corresponded about a topic of mutual interest. Our shared topic of interest being the men of the real “Alamo Rifles,” the militia company from San Antonio in the 1850’s.

Historically, those men became Company K, Sixth Texas Infantry Regiment, after the Civil War started. Back then, whole companies were formed of friends, family, and neighbors from the same community. It made for tightly-knit companies of men who cared for each other and would be more likely to help each other through the hard patches, of which the Alamo Rifles encountered their fair share.

 My first novel, Whittled Away, follows the historical path taken by the Sixth Texas Regiment, the book title coming from the Alamo Rifles steady loss of men, going from fifty-six soldiers who marched out of San Antonio in the spring of 1862, down to two soldiers who were present for the final surrender of their regiment in April of 1865.  A steady whittling away of the young men through three years of war.

In real life, only two members of the Alamo Rifles lasted until the final laying-down of their muskets at the war’s end. One of the two was a young fellow named Antonio Bustillos. I’d heard that one of Bustillos’ letters home, written while he was soldiering in Georgia, resides in the archive collection of the Alamo. Going to see the letter has been one of those things I “need” to do. Perhaps I’ve not done it because I figured there’s a good chance that the letter is written in Spanish, a language I don’t read or speak.

Regardless, my first happy surprise for the week was the e-mail message from my "virtual friend" with transcriptions of two letters Private Bustillos wrote home to family in San Antonio. One of the letters was written in May, 1864 in Dalton, Georgia, and the other in August, 1864 in Atlanta, Georgia, just a few miles from where I’m sitting at this moment.

Civil War soldiers wrote lots and lots of letters home. Military historians value soldiers’ letters as “primary sources,” - words put to paper by men whose eyes had actually seen the battles and events they describe.

However, the reality is that most soldiers’ letters, Bustillos included, addressed things nearer to the hearts of soldiers than the battles they’ve fought or the hardships they’ve endured. They wrote about the welfare of friends who were also soldiers, inquired about family, and routinely wrote things like, “Tell Sweet Mary and Mama I miss them.”

So letters, even as primary sources, tend to be of spotty value to military historians.  But they are still fun to read if you are trying to get into the heads of men who lived 150 years ago in order to bring their personalities to life in a novel. Now, I wish I’d read Bustillos’ two letters before I wrote Whittled Away, because I’d have included him as a likable character- and one I wouldn’t have to kill off along the way.

The second happy surprise this week came from my brother, who is also in Atlanta for our mom’s birthday celebration. Brother John is a retired teacher and volunteers one day a week teaching a class about religion at a prison in north Georgia. The prison sits just across the highway from the Chickamauga National Battlefield Park. The battle at Chickamauga is a big part of the story in Whittled Away, the first mega-battle where the Alamo Rifles were engaged.

A few months ago John asked if I had spare copies of Whittled Away and Tangled Honor that I might send to him to share with the prison inmates in his class. I sent six copies, three of each title, and forgot about it. Yesterday, John told me that the books are popular with his students, and are being passed around. 

There’s not much religion in my novels, except for the lightning strike that killed some soldiers during a revival service being held in a thunder storm-an event that really happened. But the inmates can perhaps connect somehow to the fact they are pretty much living on top of the battlefield featured in Whittled Away.

It’s not a big deal, nonetheless I am very happy that my novels are being read in that most unlikely of places, by such an unlikely audience. So, my thanks to John for being his brother’s “bookman,” taking a couple of good war tales to men who are serving hard time in prison for poor choices made somewhere along the way. 

If the stories of Jesús and Bain, and Captain McBee, Levi, and Faith, can entertain, maybe teach a little American history, and make some of those fellows’ long days pass faster, then those are six book copies being darned well used.

Finally, I have to thank Brother John a second time for giving me a quick tutorial on sword drill - fencing. John used to fence and coached high school fencers for a decade or more. I told him I need to write a scene involving sword drill for McBee and the other company officers in the  regiment, men who were elected to their positions,  but had never been to a military academy, yet were now expected to carry swords every day, and actually fight with them if needed.

So, John and I stood in his son’s living room with ten-inch long plastic straw swords so he could show me what “closing your line” means, and how to “bind” your enemy’s sword before he pokes you through the heart. Fun stuff like that.

I wrote the sword drill scene this morning and he gave me a brotherly stamp of “it’ll do.”

 And that’ll do for me. Talk to you next week sometime.