Now that it is just a memory I can’t help but think what I am sure others have already thought, and that is if this had been real, we would have marched on. We would have probably lost comrades to the chill and to crossing flooded streams. Animals would have died. Wagons would have broken down. But, we would have pressed on, yank and reb and somewhere south of Mansfield we would have had a show down and many would have died, been wounded, or marched off to some foul prison camp. Then we would have reversed our march and a day later repeated the carnage at Pleasant Hill. We would have marched, exchanging occasional fire. The mud would have become dust. The cold rain would have been replaced by the heat and humidity until the next rain came to turn the roads to mud again. Mosquitoes would have flourished. Ticks and chiggers would have popped out to plaque us with misery. More suffering, more deaths until finally the Federals would have crossed the Atchayala to safety and the Confederates would have returned north. Civilians would have buried some of the dead. Others would have simply been forgotten in the forest where they fell far from home. They would have tried to put together their lives back together, rebuild the homes that had been burned and washed away the blood from the floors of their homes, their churches, their schools where men had bled out. This was something that would be repeated somewhere else and had been repeated for nearly three years. People suffering, people dying, the land baring the scars of war. People with long memories remembering for the rest of their lives what had happen. We only played war, but I know and you know, we got a small taste of it all in the Kisatchie woods. I know this, when we stood on the forest service road Friday morning with a cold rain falling and mud oozing around blistered feet and bodies tired and thoughts foggy with fatigue, I saw the finest people this hobby has to offer. Others, the civilians, were not there, but they are the finest also. Calling people iron men and women of Kisatchie seems a bit trite, but that is the best I can come up with to describe folks that endured and perservered. Thanks to all of you and on some muddy or dusty road or around some campfire, I hope to meet you all again.
Tom