It’s been forever, I know. I should have at least updated my other shop’s cheers as Sotomayor became a Justice, especially the soulful essay about how she, a wise Latina herself, felt during that confirmation ceremony. But given the demands of that other shop (go look! Make comments!) and that I’ve been writing the lastContinue reading “Unstuck in time again, in a good way”
Tag Archives: dissenting soldiers
zero hour, nine a.m.
It’s Pearl Harbor Day – a day I’m writing about right now in my chapter, when a lot of my characters felt put on notice. And right now so do I, with my deadline screaming at me. My most recent blogging has been at a Facebook page I put together for Ain’t Marching, rather thanContinue reading “zero hour, nine a.m.”
while I was gone
I’d thought of pasting, and will at the end of this post, Soule’s testimony to an Army inquiry about Colorado’s Sand Creek Massacre, which he answers in classic soldier’s understatement.
Were these families, women and children, scalped and mutilated?
Yes, sir. They were.
Soule was far less understated in a letter to a fellow soldier: “I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized. One squaw was wounded and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, and he cut one arm off, and held the other with one hand and dashed the hatchet through her brain ” He had already told his friend about his own refusal to participate in the carnage. “I was then ordered with my whole company to Major A- with 20 days rations. I told him I would not take part in their intended murder….”
After recovering from the news enough to write about, it was time to jump 30 years to the blessed end of the century. An easy project, what with the Spanish-American War, the Jackson Barracks riots, and Americans nosing around China’s Boxer rebellion …. you get the point.
I Ain't Marching Anymore 