Hah! You thought we were done with this? No way. Great-Great Uncle Patrick had the gift of gab, and that is why he is the certerpiece of so many family stories about the sprawling history of the Civil War. is stories about his role as a teenager and young man in the War Between the […]

(Mr. Claude Minnich, almost former owner of Clark’s Hardware on historic East Davis Street in downtown Culpeper. Photo courtesy Vincent Vala, Star-Exponent Staff Photographer). OK- this is going to be a little disjointed, so forewarned is forearmed, you know? The trip to New Orleans and Raymond, Mississippi put 2,335.6 miles on the odometer of the […]

(Those who died during the Battle of Raymond were buried on a hillside in the Raymond Cemetery. The hillside later became the Raymond Confederate Cemetery. Randal McGavock was buried here the day after the battle of Raymond, but later removed. The plot is mowed neatly and well maintained. Photo Socotra). I felt triumphant that our […]

(Colonel Randall McGavock, 10th Tennessee Irish Regiment, CSA) We walked back up the asphalt path that surrounds the core area of the battlefield at Raymond slowly. Both of us are having some mobility problems these days- I beat my knees into submission and the arthritis is painful, amplified by that damned ruptured quadriceps a couple […]

We were walking the paved loop around the core battlefield at Raymond. It was a sunny Mississippi afternoon, the air languid and soft against our skin. There was another walker on foot, maybe a quarter mile ahead, and a jogger over by the abandoned concrete road and bridge across Fourteen Mile Creek. “The Raymond battlefield […]

There is nothing like walking a battlefield to understand what happened on it. The terrain is all, an imperative you can only feel with your own legs, and marvel at what was expected of the legs of ill-fed people in heavy woolen uniforms on a humid Mississippi day. And add the realization and the simple […]

  It was Mother’s Day, and I was headed for Hinds County, Mississippi, coming up from The Big Easy via Bay Saint Louis on the Gulf Coast. I passed through Hattiesburg in the mid-afternoon where the two city police officers, one white and one African-American , had been gunned down the night before. Flags were […]

I was seated directly under the 500-pound bomb on the trapeze release under the Douglas Dauntless SBD dive-bomber the Navy taught Dad to fly down at NAS Pensacola. He told me the principle was fairly simple. Pop the big speedbrake flaps with the circular holes in them, point the nose of the airplane at the […]

I was in New Orleans on the 70th Anniversary of Victory In Europe Day. I was at the ceremony to mark the occasion at a remarkable place, the World War Two Museum. I had a chance to meet with its President and some senior staff about what is coming next for what they call “New […]

It was almost noon before I could extricate myself from the farm. It had started to rain just when I was going to cut the front yard and ensure that the place didn’t look abandoned, so I thought I might get to make a pass with the Turf Tiger before the 0900 conference call, but […]