Would anybody here like to confess to morbid curiosity?
No?
Okay, then. I’ll go first.
I’d like to know what those poor people in the twin towers were thinking, and how the desperation felt.
Same for the astronauts buckled into the Challenger shuttle, although I’ll bet none of them had time to think anything at all.
Shall I keep going?
Or shall I tell you I’m not the only one who likes to peek in on the hopeless?
Michael Shaara confesses to the same depravity, in his book, The Killer Angels. “Stephen Crane once said that he wrote The Red Badge of Courage because reading the cold history was not enough; he wanted to know what it was like to be there. . . . This book was written for much the same reason.”
Shaara takes us all to a little town called Gettysburg, where nothing important has ever happened and yet two nations meet there. We feel the stifling summer heat, the maddening mystery of spotting a few soldiers of the opposing army and not knowing exactly how many there are. Eventually we hear the whistle of bullets, smell the smoke and feel the earth shaking from the artillery.
Soon, we see the blood bubbling out of the injured. We hear the sweet lies somebody tells a wounded buddy just before he passes out. We feel the desperation when one brigade needs help and there’s nobody left to send.
Most of all, we live out the agony of making life-and-death decisions. We walk the ground with James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s second-in-command. Like most of Lee’s soldiers, Longstreet loves the old general. But when Lee announces his plan of attack, Longstreet knows it won’t work. Does he lead the troops to certain death, maybe even his own? Or does he quit?
For all the horror that was Gettysburg, Shaara’s “being there” includes a chipper, tagalong Englishman, who thinks the whole business is “strordnry!” It includes cozy evening campfires, where soldiers share stories, liquor and camaraderie with no idea how grisly tomorrow will be.
As for our own tomorrows, I’m pretty sure it’s more blasts of wind. My drug of choice for this misery is—no surprise—flour tortillas, filled with this chicken-and-bean goodness.
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