Editor's note: Paul O'Connor, a free-lance editorial writer for the Journal who works from Raleigh, is traveling across the country this spring by car. We will publish his weekly travelogues each Sunday.
SHILOH, Tenn. -- About a dozen years ago a now-deceased buddy stood alongside a battlefield cemetery and said, "I hate that they make these horrible places so beautiful."
Travel across this country, as I am doing this spring, and Dave Brumitt's words ring very true. Often, our most beautiful places are the restored battlefields that for a few days years ago were so horrible.
The Battle of Shiloh, fought in April 1862, cost our country -- both sides -- 23,746 casualties. That was more dead, wounded and missing in two days than we had suffered in all of our previous wars.
Yet today the battlefield is a place of peace, quiet and beauty.
The Hornet's Nest was a key point in the battle. While Union forces fell back and regrouped from a surprise attack, an Iowa unit held off a Confederate assault for seven vicious hours. Artillery batteries fired at each other from only a few hundred yards apart.
Today, the Hornet's Nest is a peaceful meadow lined with trees and silent cannons. The Union line is marked by a monument to the Iowa troops and a split-rail fence. The Confederate line is marked by a cannon battery.
In Chickamauga, Ga., just south of Chattanooga, visitors today may walk gorgeous trails that wind through woods and across pleasant fields. In the distance, the surrounding mountains shimmer. Chickamauga was a place, that day, where a teenage couple smooched in their pick-up and children ran through a picnic area. But in November 1863, more than 125,000 men used those same fields and forests to kill each other for two hideous days, creating 34,000 casualties.
While our nation winds down one war in Iraq and ratchets up another in Afghanistan, America remembers the contributions of her service men and women. In almost every town, there is a memorial to local troops. That's true in liberal Milford, Conn., and conservative Corinth, Miss. One of the most moving I've seen is near Portland, Oregon's, famed rose garden.
On the Chickamauga battlefield, there are more than 1,400 battlefield monuments. Many are works of art in their own right, adding to the beauty of the horrible place.
North Carolina has only three markers at Chickamauga -- two are difficult to find and the third is almost impossible to read. The inscription may have been chiseled in stone, but more than 100 years of weather have left the message nearly indecipherable. Many of the other markers are likewise illegible, especially those set out for Tennessee forces.
In Little Rock and Oklahoma City, much thought and creativity went into the state monuments. They put to shame North Carolina's unimaginative official monument on Capitol Square in Raleigh.
Much is made in the current political dialogue about "supporting our troops" and remembering their contributions. At each of the battlefields I have toured this month, there have been visitors doing just that.
Dave was a Vietnam vet and he remembered battlefields only as places of horror. But be it Shiloh, Chickamauga or any of the other places where national military parks now stand, it is important to remember that they were beautiful before war visited. Today, they are beautiful places again and fitting venues to enjoy the peace so many of our ancestors paid such a horrible price to win.
■ Paul O'Connor can be reached at ocolumn@mindspring.com.
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