gettysburg national military park

Gettysburg National Military Park

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Gettysburg National Military Park has to be experienced. There's much more than I could cover in a sweltering August day, or probably several days if I tried.

It's one thing to read the statistics in a history book, and quite another to walk there and see the many monuments placed years after the battle, testifying to the lasting impact that it had on states and communities and families who suffered the loss of loved ones and probably often, impoverishment from the loss of fathers and husbands who were breadwinners.

Gettysburg cost the nation 51,000 killed and wounded, mostly robust young men brought here by idealism and full of hopes and dreams and plans for the future, some lives snuffed out in an instant and some fading slowly in agony, pinned beneath the weight of the corpses of their friends and comrades. Field hospitals were more akin to slaughterhouses than to places of healing; field medicine often consisted of wholesale amputations without anaesthetic. The statistics cite many "missing." I wonder how many of those were blown to bits, rendered unrecognizable by canister shot at close range, and how many, having survived a first charge or cannonade, said "**** this!" and quietly slipped away to walk home or to disappear into the countryside.

It was a war where traditional military tactics involving orderly advances and open-field charges of massed troops met head-on with new weaponry designed to cut huge swaths from those ranks. As a kid I used to marvel at the artillery and other weapons as artifacts. Now when I look at them, I can only see them in terms of the ghastly carnage they were created to produce.

The National Park Service has created an appropriate and respectful memorial. The sights and signs are pretty much self-explanatory. This is a very small sampling of what's there. I'll shut up now.

I'd like to hear from one of the leaders of this group. Please email me at the address in the header of this site, and use a subject line specific enough that the spam filters won't kick it out. Thanks.

Pennsylvania Memorial on the left