August 29, 2021

One troubling thing that I have noticed recently, in light of this new Covid world, is the fact that we have seemingly lost touch with our not too distant past. I’m a fifty year old man, and I can still recall the stories my grandmother, (born in 1907), told me about her grandfather who had been a calvary soldier in the American Civil War.
His name was John Settles and he rode with several Confederate calvary units in Virginia during the war. He was a horse trader and a saddle maker by trade. I heard these second hand accounts as a youngster about various battles and skirmishes, sitting around a potbelly stove while “Gram” crocheted one of her endless projects.
I had battlefield fatigue before I even entered puberty.
I also had a great interest in American History and when we covered the Civil War in about 8th grade or so, I couldn’t get enough of it; trying to image when and where my great, great grandfather might have been riding around the countryside, six guns blasting from the back of a running horse.
My point in all of this is to promote the idea that the notion of our ancestor’s struggles have become too detached on some level, at least for most of us. We have lost the sense of understanding that the mistakes our ancestors made should be a model for us as evolving souls to learn from and not re-experience them on any level. A good plan would be to get out there and relive those experiences on a tangible level. And truthfully, in this post Covid world, there’s no better way to do that than to visit some of these historical battlefields.
I recently got to visit The Shiloh National Battleground in McNary County Tennessee. This is the same place that Sheriff Buford Pusser created the iconic American Sheriff profile in the form of “Walking Tall”, (if you don’t now what I’m talking about, look it up, watch the movie, thank me later). This place is fraught with history and was a key landing for both northern and southern soldiers during the American Civil War. It is an excellent place to partake of a military surplus tent adventure while the uncertainty of a rogue virus and its terrible variants remain active.
If you go to Shiloh, make sure you look up Larry Deberry. He’s the curator of the Shiloh Battlefield Tours Museum, and he’s an all-around great guy. He’s 6th or 7th generation southerner, who’s family lived and died in and around Shiloh since well before the battle ever took place. I promise you won’t be disappointed.