***(Editor’s Note:  Charlie Pratt is a Guest Columnist and Creative/Web Design Consultant for “The Thirsty Quill.” It must be noted that the views expressed within Mr. Pratt’s articles are his personal opinions, and may not necessarily reflect those of “The Thirsty Quill.” Charlie is also an accomplished writer, and he published this post on his personal blog www.charliewrites.com on February 18^th. ‘The Quill’ appreciates Mr. Pratt’s contribution (his third), and we look forward to publishing more of his creative pieces in the future.)***

“A Letter For Captain Embree”

By: Charlie Pratt, Columnist

Robert E. Lee watched 28,000 of his men fall at Gettysburg, bloody and dying there, alongside 23,000 Union soldiers, and it broke his heart. “All this has been my fault,” Lee lamented to his advisers. He tried to resign, but Jefferson Davis, then President of the Confederate States of America, wouldn’t let him. Davis knew there was an imperative, a need for a leader, even in the face of great loss and against an overwhelming force that someone take up the banner and hold the truths of their cause to be self-evident, and if no longer self-evident, then made to be so with cannons, explosions, and body parts.

The cost of these things cannot be measured by men.

President Lincoln has received a lot of posthumous press lately, mostly because President Obama has brought his name to the forefront. Historians, anxious for relevance in a world that practices its ability to judge others with a quick, darting, ever-sharpening blade, have been gathering to rank the Presidents and, just like everyone who’s ever written something, provide the final answer on a subject, taking the thinking out of living.

Historians say this or that, as they’re wont to do. We, the people, quick to lean on these statements for the sake of expediency (but mostly for lack of research on the matter), redistribute their findings without study and without scholarship, making pop culture out of anything and everything we can.

Capt. David Embree, under the leadership of General William Rosencrans, chased Gen. Braxton Bragg and his Army of Tennessee (stop to consider the idea of a Tennessee Army, if you have a spare ten seconds) into Georgia. It was the autumn of 1863. 125,000 men clashed on the field of battle, and no less than 35,000 died within a period of two sunsets time.

That’s one-third of the population of Midland, Texas.

Capt. Embree had this to say about battle, and what happens to those therein:

“There is no man, however brave he may be, who does not when the storm begins to rage fiercest around him; when he sees a friend on the right and another on the left, stricken down and quivering in the agonies of death…who does not involuntarily and mentally appeal to God for protection.” 1

I once made an asinine judgment  to a friend of mine - in one of those prickish, self-involved moments that seems to visit me at least once a day - about veterans returning from Iraq with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I assured him that those numbers were inflated. I asserted that it had to do with the weakness of our generation, and of the selfishness of our citizens. Our tendency to label everything and to amplify any and every frailty. I said this without thought, without regard for the soldiers themselves, and without a moment’s understanding as to what it’s like to see a friend killed. Shameful, really.

Capt. Embree of the Union Army would have most likely pulled me aside (or at least I hope he would have), and told me the very thing he told his sister that same year:

“It is terrible to hear the singing of a bullet and follow its course as it flies on its way and then to hear that keen whistle of the little piece of lead suddenly terminate in a dull crush, as the ball leaps through the brain of some friend beside you. I noticed one case particularly like this. The ball came obliquely from the left and front and passed several feet in front of me. It seemed that I could hear it singing almost fro the time it left its bed in the rebel’s gun, and as it swiftly came I knew where it was going, by the sound. Suddenly I heard the same ball go crash! against something and I knew by the sound that it had burst a human skull. I barely had time to look around a few minutes to my right and then I saw Sergt. Chauncy Glodsmith quivering and dying.”

These aren’t the inspiring, hope-infused letters that a brother wishes to write to his sister. The things I write to my beautiful sister Jenny are usually very simple birthday greetings or Christmas cards, along with the occasional email or a Facebook message. I can’t imagine relating such things to her, but I assume Capt. Embree didn’t write his letter for his sister in particular, but rather for the sake of knowing. He knew that what he’d seen needed a voice, that these were letters must be written to preserve his soul in the face of such stark and swift tragedy, so that the events swirling around him, so easily forgotten or repressed, would be purposefully and painfully remembered.

Capt. Embree closed his letter to his sister with this:

“I have come to the conclusion that Shakespeare is right when he says ‘There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we may.’ And that Destiny is Deity that shields and protects, or permits to be stricken down, as his wisdom chooses.”

I was thinking the other day of how rough hewn my history has been, and how sorry I am that it has not been more polished; that my legacy, whatever it will be, was not better though-out, reasoned, and measured. I haven’t seen battle, but I know of sadness. I haven’t seen the damage that a bullet can do, but deadly projectiles, I’ve found, come in many forms, both tangible and abstract.

So many of the things we hold forth about, the soapboxes and the platforms of our lives, so many of these things would be left behind in moments like the ones Capt. Embree experienced. I can’t help but think that there’s something true in the midst of his chaotic recounting of the bloody battles near Chattanooga.

Something relevant.

I count myself cursed, and also blessed, to have absorbed these memories, made by others, some of which never got the chance to breathe words beyond the moment. Why some are elected to absorb the bullets that inspire the letters that are read randomly by less-tested men in times much further ahead eludes me. I don’t feel particularly lucky to have dodged the bullets, rather the burden of the truths that are carried by such things impel me to stretch my mind to places not previously wondered.

Wonder is the thing that makes us pause. I think perhaps that tonight, I will thank God for my rest, for my safety, and also utter a prayer for the men who suffer the burden of knowing these things that we merely comment on. Perhaps that’s what liberty really is for most of us. A perverse ignorance that comes in the form of a bloody gift, paid for by someone who cannot enjoy it, but would readily bestow it again, if given the chance.

I feel really rather small, if you want to know the truth. And that seems right.

Carroll, Andrew. War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars. New York: Washington Square Press, 2001 [↩]

***(Editor’s Note:  Charlie Pratt is a Guest Columnist and Creative/Web Design Consultant for “The Thirsty Quill.” It must be noted that the views expressed within Mr. Pratt’s articles are his personal opinions, and may not necessarily reflect those of “The Thirsty Quill.” Charlie is also an accomplished writer, and he published this post on his personal blog www.charliewrites.com on February 18^th. ‘The Quill’ appreciates Mr. Pratt’s contribution (his third), and we look forward to publishing more of his creative pieces in the future.)***