It’s Friday 6:15 am, October 19, 1781. Awakening this morning is different. Yeah, it’s very different. Yesterday at this time the stench of burning smoke wrinkled my nostrils. My head retreated from the repeated booming sounds of cannon fire. Morning after morning it was the same. I dressed in the same smelly uniform, put on the same worn, cracked boots caked with mud, grabbed my musket, went outside and joined my patriot brother soldiers. There were two hundred thousand of us. We were the ones wearing blue uniforms with red and white trim. Our job was to follow orders and engage in a life and death battle with the enemy. The enemy, they were the ones wearing red uniforms with blue and white trim. In three words, “life and death” was my day.
Emblazoned within me is the day my brother soldier, five feet from me, was struck by enemy cannon fire, and now lay dying in my arms. An obvious panic crept into his eyes. No shriek or crying out, or great pain, that I remember. Time stopped! I’m not sure how long we lay there together. His look of panic gave way to realization, and acceptance that he was going to die. There was nothing he said, no words I recall. But a guttural sound came from the back of his throat, his warm blood pooled in the palm of my hand, his head rested in my lap and his eyes locked on mine. And then he was gone! His life passed through to the center of my being. It’s a toll forever inscribed in my memory. I now experienced the death of war, up close and personal.
But this morning is different. It’s quiet. As I swing my legs out of bed, I can barely hear my feet touching the floor. First, my left foot, then the right. I sat and listened to these soft, quiet sounds. I hadn’t listened to quiet in a very long time. Across the room, my musket’s propped against the wall. My thought voice whispers, “I’m going to put you away today. “My head nods “Yes.”
Yesterday, I was an Unknown Soldier in George Washington’s Continental Army. I realize now that I was a first-hand witness to one of the most consequential moments in American history. I participated in the Yorktown Siege, the final battle of the American Revolutionary War. The British surrendered. So today is indeed different from yesterday. Today, America declares its independence!
Without war, the Declaration of Independence, signed five years earlier, would have been meaningless. Its words, “the right of all men to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and governments instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” would have been pointless words, on worthless pages. They would not have ushered Americans into a new way of life. But I, and my brother patriot soldiers, we pushed, we strained, we sacrificed, and at that final battle in Yorktown, British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered.
“American Democracy is Born!” This was the headline everywhere. The message spread like wildfire to every corner of every state. Maybe I should have danced in the streets and celebrated our victory, but I didn’t. I sat alone, I felt drained, empty, I felt like crying.
Finally! Finally, it stopped. I was strained to the breaking point. I couldn’t have stood another day of fear, of gunfire, of injury, or of death. But of course, I would have, and I did! I had no choice but to continue because I was part of a unit, a squad, a team, a brotherhood of soldiers who depended on each other for protection and survival. I had to show up, don my helmet, load my musket, and do battle with the enemy.
Today, the British soldiers are sending their uniforms, helmets, and muskets to somewhere back across the ocean. What about mine? My uniform and musket had become a part of me. Strange as it may sound, I feel awkward at the thought of parting with them. Should I memorialize them? Should I put them in a trunk for someday to show to my grandchildren? Or should I simply burn them?
But that was yesterday, and finally I’m heading home.
On the road home, I passed fields still smelling of smoke and a countryside laden with remnant reminders of battle. They generate feelings of vacancy and emptiness. As we journey our way home to families, neighbors, and towns, we soldiers don’t say much. We mostly keep our thoughts to ourselves. Finally at home, there is sharing in celebrations and stories of victory. But I, like many of us, hide my tales of horror. I find myself gravitating to those wanting to share in feelings of anguish over the loss or injury of loved ones. I deeply recall spending a long full day with grief-stricken parents, quietly sharing a cup of tea, a homemade cookie, their childhood photos, and listening to them reminisce throughout their day of mourning.
Returning home from the war was bittersweet! Wars ending isn’t simple for soldiers.
My patriot brothers and I believed we had left battle and war behind us when we left Yorktown. We had paid a personal and very bloody price. But at last, we believed we were done with paying. We believed, we had to believe in our hearts, that the muskets we were laying down would never need to be raised again.
However, a higher and smarter power existed and knew that historically this was a beginning and not an end. One of us, an unknown soldier, was chosen to eavesdrop, observe, record, interpret, and report on the lives of American soldiers, their wars, and their ongoing struggles to save freedom and democracy over the next couple of centuries.
I am that chosen Unknown Soldier!
So, I began to look out across time. It’s exactly twenty-nine thousand nine hundred eighty-one days and fifteen Presidents later. I am standing here with soldiers gathered at the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, just one hundred eighty-three miles north from where our last cannon fired. The trim on the blue uniforms has changed from red to yellow. Other than that, soldiers are still soldiers. Shoulder to shoulder we listen in utter disbelief. Me and my brethren had fought, bled, and sacrificed so as not to be hearing this. A tall, gaunt, bearded president stood and began reading from a paper envelope, “Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.” So consequential was this ten-sentence, two-minute Gettysburg Address, that it has remained in history books and classrooms throughout America, ever since.
This Civil War continued two more years after President Lincoln’s address, until the battle at Appomattox, like the Siege at Yorktown, finally signaled an end to war. Democracy survived. Perhaps a more inclusive democracy might follow this Civil War. The founding fathers wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” In retrospect, I realize those two powerful 1776 words, “all men,” did not include Black Slaves or Native American Indians. Hopefully, today’s fathers will remember and acknowledge what I and our founding fathers so conspicuously and shamefully ignored.
I thought, surely, Appomattox would be the final battle, and President Lincoln would be right to say, “a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”.
But no, a painfully ill-omened pathway still lay ahead! I bemoan to report that neither Yorktown nor Appomattox was to be the final battle. Instead of wars ceasing, the opposite is occurring. Instead of an ending, my story about America at war is expanding.
One hundred thirty-six years after we raised the victory flag at Yorktown, and fifty-two years after Appomattox, Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth President following George Washington, sent the country a message of another even larger war. President Wilson described World War I as, “The Great War,” as a war to make the world “safe for democracy,” and “the war to end all wars.” Along with the world, I listened. Secretly I whispered, “Please let him be right, don’t let this be false hope.”
Killing tools for this war were inconceivably greater and more powerful than those of my Revolutionary War. We were able to see our cannons loft a cannonball and watch as it landed a few hundred yards away. Now I look up in utter disbelief to see iron birds carrying rapid firing cannons into the skies. These unimaginable flying weapons can carry their explosions to targets miles away. These new tools of World War I caused the frequency of deaths that counted in the thousands in our War of Independence, and in the hundreds of thousands in the Civil War, to escalate to millions in this Great War.
Judging from the expansion of countries involved and multiplication of armaments used, I had trouble seeing how this war was ever going to end. But finally, after four long years, it ended with signing the Treaty of Versailles. President Wilson urged the creation of, “A League of Nations.” This was to be an organization for international cooperation. Its intent was to prevent a repetition of this First World War. Sadly, his intentions were largely ignored. The world didn’t listen. The effort failed. Just two decades later, clouds were forming for yet another World War.
Today is December 8, 1941. I’m standing on the footsteps of the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. I’m seeing it for the first time. I’m overcome by the aura of prestige it radiates. I realize, were it not for my army’s long ago sacrifices, this distinguished symbol of our government might not have come into being. The building begins speaking to me. Solemnly it says, “On this day, within these halls, serious men are about to discuss matters of serious world importance.”
Nazism of Hitler’s Germany, Fascism of Mussolini’s Italy, and Imperialism of Hirohito’s Japan leave no doubt of their intent to destroy the United States and impose a rule other than democracy. Their messages are of such enormity, they cannot be ignored. Not by me, not by we Americans! Not by the world!
Pearl Harbor happened! Rising to a rostrum, with his wheelchair at his side, in an auditorium filled with the elected members of both houses of Congress, I listened exquisitely as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt soberly began, “December 7th, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy.” On the heels of these grave words, masses of soldiers donned their country’s helmets, shouldered firearms, and readied themselves to face their darkest fears of battle. The United States entered World War II.
Once in a great while, circumstances are such that a phrase becomes history and continues to endure for decades thereafter. These words of FDR were such.
The battles, weaponry and strategies for this war were so massively different from the sword, musket and cannon I handled in my war, as to be beyond belief. Consequentially, the harms these soldiers were forced to endure and inflict grew in immeasurable enormity.
Back in our War of Independence, soldiers like me were the ones to suffer the loss of life and limb, not civilians. This time is different. As never before, World War II blurred the lines between military and civilian targets. Aircraft dropped millions of tons of bombs that spread to centers populated by ordinary resident people. Homes and communities had the misfortune of being in the wake of war and became its victims. Soldiers had to bear witness to wide swaths of homes with the bodies of men, women and children, along with their pets and treasures, being reduced to nothing but rubble. Our bombs or theirs, their tragic realities became indistinguishable.
In May and again in August 1945, four long years after President Roosevelt’s words, this horrific Second World War ended with final battles and surrenders. Once again, treaties were signed with the aim of ending conflict. Leaders fostered the creation of “The United Nations. “Its aim was to facilitate peace, avert wars and safeguard freedoms.
Before ending, 40 million civilian fatalities had outnumbered 15 million military deaths. Horrific Nazi Genocide and Holocaust atrocities added ten million deaths to the civilian toll. Two U.S. bombs accounted for more than 100,000 civilian deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The implications are staggering. These profound, raw horrors are laid wide open before me! 100 thousand, 15 million, 40 million! These numbers are so massive, so unimaginable, I become numb trying to envision, comprehend and report. I see it, I cannot help seeing it. But these are totally foreign territories of experience for me. My heart remembers, but my mind is unable to conjure words capable of reaching around such magnitude.
At reunions and tavern gatherings, I’m struck by the similarity between stories from my yesteryear war and those of the subsequent 240 years. This stands in stark contrast to the differences in waging the wars. Soldiers exchange stories of lying awake at night unable to sleep, reliving hours of firing and dodging bullets and explosions. With eyes closed they can smell sulfur from exploded gunfire, reminiscent of rotten eggs. Soldiers know and can remember horror!
And long after the final battle, even if soldiers are lucky to escape physical injury, the experiences endured can torture with nightmares, feelings of isolation, and long-lasting emotional after-effects. In my war it was called soldier’s fatigue, World War soldiers called it Shell Shock, and most recently it’s referred to as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The names may have changed, but the life-changing after-effects have not. Organizations, programs, family and friends try to help. Their efforts are appreciated, and work to some extent, but witnessing death, injury, destruction and suffering in such a manner and magnitude cannot be willfully forgotten.
In the Seventy-eight years following the horrendous tragedies of World War II, soldiers have been sent into battle after battle, year after year. Battles in the Korean War lasted three years, and in the Vietnam War eleven years. All were under the umbrella of a fifty-year Cold War, aiming to prevent the spread of Communism’s envisioned threat to Democracy. In response to the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, a War in Iraq lasted eight years, and in Afghanistan twenty-one years. It shivers me to report on the number of soldier lives lost in wars listed in this single paragraph.
I am acutely drawn to visit and pay respect to these fallen soldiers. I visited the 58,281 soldiers whose names are recorded on the 200 feet of wall at the “Vietnam War Memorial. “I visited the aisles and aisles of more than 400,000 warrior gravestones at the 639 acres at Arlington National Cemetery. Though I knew not a single name, emotions swelled.
I stand before the “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier”. Carved into white marble in all capital lettering, I whisper, “HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER KNOWN BUT TO GOD.”
As if only yesterday, images returned of the brother soldier dying in my arms. Fresh to mind is the day sharing anguish and mourning with parents for their fallen son. With thoughts of them, I recognize the building of a distinct feeling, the one so hard to describe that precedes tears welling. My tongue reached for the tear slowly finding its way to my upper lip. I don’t recall these soldiers’ names either.
Most recently, and in some ways the most unthinkable, on January 6, 2021, once again, Democracy came under attack. At the end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a mob of Americans stormed the seat of democracy. They did so while Congress was in session certifying the election of George Washington’s forty-sixth uninterrupted successor. Riotous groups were determined this succession does not take place, and free and fair elections be thwarted. Democracy survived this attack. But for good reason, this Unknown Soldier fears it’s only a reprieve.
After witnessing the two hundred and forty-two anniversaries of the day I closeted my musket, I sadly report seeing my multi-generational family of brother and sister soldiers engaged in war after war on more than one hundred anniversaries of that long ago day.
Unquestionably, war is personally enormous for a soldier. Repeatedly, I have witnessed a soldier’s life be turned upside down. In a heartbeat, he was torn from his family, flown to another part of the world and thrown into war and battle.
So, at some point, a soldier must ask himself the unanswerable question “why must a war begin again and again? “Given its intimate relevance, he feels he should be able to offer a reasonable response. But alas he cannot! The why of war eludes him. The why of a war has been decided for him!
However reluctant, leaders and Commanders in Chief repeatedly find conflicts over territory, economics, power, or democratic principles sufficient to declare war against one another. Trained soldiers are a key weapon of war. Concur or not, the soldier has no time for comment or opinion. Soldiers are organized into squads, platoons, battalions, brigades and entire armed forces to follow the chain of command into the gruesome experiences of battle and war.
Over and over again, I’ve seen words like liberty, democracy, freedom, and independence lose their meaning as the sound of bullets zing past, as explosions come closer, as ships sink, as planes fall out of the sky, as comrades cry out, as blood, and injury and death surround everywhere. Fear, mounting fear, rather than words of principle, can take over the here and now. Fear for survival can drown out all else. Yet the soldier has no choice, he is committed to continue.
Although not obvious when I was leaving Yorktown, I now conclude that freedom and democracy are imperfect and fragile. I can no longer see it in any other way. And, it probably has always been so, and likely to always be so. That treasured privilege of, “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, is continuing to grow more and more costly as it becomes more and more difficult to defend.
At this point, I must ask the obvious, “how many more final battles can there be? “The answer stuns me into “Oh my God” because I see circumstances percolating toward a war capable of spreading around the world like a cascading wall of dominos. And like never before, this looming war has the potential for catastrophic global devastation.
I am, The Heart, Soul, and Voice of an Unknown Soldier George Washington’s Continental Army – 1781
