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thedrifter
05-17-09, 08:41 AM
May 17, 2009
Ron Simon: Gettysburg visit leaves indelible images on my mind

By RON SIMON
News Journal

The Gettysburg battlefield is a haunted place. It is a place full of rock-studded hills where too much dying happened during a handful of searingly hot days in July, 1863. The community's fields were littered with broken bodies. Streams flowed red with blood.

More than 50,000 American men and one woman were killed or wounded here.

Tourists flock into this perfect little Pennsylvania town on a spring day to learn or re-learn the facts of this epic battle between two American armies.

The village swarms with people, most of them schoolchildren. Tour buses growl along narrow roads that traverse Seminary Ridge, Cemetery Hill, the Peach Orchard, Plum Run, the Devil's Den and Little Round Top.

Trained tour guides try to help visitors make sense of the battle, which lasted three days.

They talk about masses of men in gray and butternut uniforms crossing fields and having their ranks torn to pieces by the guns and cannons manned by soldiers in blue uniforms.

And it ends, as always, with a brief speech by Abraham Lincoln that many of us memorized as junior high school students.

"Four score and seven years ago ..."

One day in either 1949 or 1950, my family came here in that old black Chevrolet while on the way home from Washington, D.C.

We had visited Washington's Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the Smithsonian and watched the U.S. Senate at work. Now we wanted to see the great battlefield before we tackled the Alleghany Mountains.

But rain was coming down in sheets and the world was covered in a heavy, unrelenting mist. There would be no tour. Someday, maybe, but not that day.

Last week that day arrived. Helen and I boarded a tour bus on Cemetery Hill.

The Devil's Den and Little Round Top will stay in my memory for a long time. A lot longer, in fact, than the muddy tracks and brown rivers of Vietnam.

War stinks. Period. But it does leave some incredible monuments in its wake, and not just at places like Gettysburg, Antietam, Valley Forge or Bastogne.

In Washington, D.C., the war monuments are monumental.

The World War II Memorial is a place where old men in garrison caps or in wheel chairs are honored. Some who push their chairs have a motto on the backs of their sweaters that reads: "Ours is to stand on the curb and cheer as they go by."

This is the place where the Greatest Generation is making its last stand.

The men of Salerno, Anzio, Normandy, Remegan, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa have come to see and be seen. Cameras flash as they grin. This is their time.

Nearby is a grim reminder that wars keep coming. The men and women who walk slowly along the reflective Wall are starting to turn gray themselves. They are looking for names of men who died in a far away place before they were old enough to vote.

The Korean War monument, with its depiction of wary, half-frozen Marines marching away from the Chosin Reservoir, is perhaps the most interesting. Look at those faces beneath the steel pots. See the weariness and the misery. See war as it is.

I didn't see any monuments to the men who fought in World War I. Perhaps we would rather forget that slaughter pen of a fight. Especially since it only led to a bigger, nastier war.

The last place my friend and I visited was Harper's Ferry, W.Va. This is where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet and break out of the mountains.

It is a dramatic spot. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that the view here is worth a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.

Just as it happened back in 1949 or 1950, rainstorms marred the first part of our trip on the National Road.

I have a feeling it won't take half a century to make up that loss. We'll be back on the National Road before long.

Ron Simon is a retired News Journal reporter and columnist. E-mail Simon at rsimon@ neo.rr.com or call 419-756-7269.
Additional Facts

DAR honors columnist Ron Simon


News Journal columnist Ron Simon was honored with a Community Volunteer Service Award at the May meeting of the Jared Mansfield Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Past Regent LaDonna O'Neal presented Simon with the honor.

Simon served in the U.S. Army from 1960 to 1965, with service in Vietnam from 1961 to 62. He was with the 173rd. Airborne Regiment. First trained as a courier, he eventually worked on the army newspaper in Okinawa.

With the News Journal, he has profiled more than 300 veterans of Korea and World War II and continues to do so. He has volunteered for Toy Time, Raemelton Equestrian Therapeutic Center, Friend To Friend to visiting nursing homes, Mansfield Memorial Museum, the Red Cross, and has served on the Mansfield Bicentennial Committee and the Richland County Joint Veterans council.

DAR is dedicated to historical preservation, promotion of education and patriotic endeavors. Anyone interested in joining the DAR should call the Chapter Registrar at 419-756-4534 or the Regent at 419-683-3667.

The Jared Mansfield Chapter will have a celebration of the chapter's 90th anniversary at the Westbrook Country Club in June.

Ellie