Sometime I will have to rank my favorite days of the year. I can always toss off the top three but am always torn between which is number two and which is number three? Of the two Seventeenths, March and September, which do I enjoy more?
Today, oddly enough, I’m leaning toward the Seventeenth of September.
One hundred forty two years ago a fellow named Daniel (or William) Dreher got his red badge of courage either on September 16 on the way to the fields around Sharpsburg, Maryland or in the midst of heavy fighting on September 17. There’s probably no way to know for sure. What we do know is that Dreher was slightly wounded, sent to a field hospital and then sent home to Indiana due to the effects of that wound and a lingering, unreported hernia. By July of the next year, 1863, he was back in the Army although his service was less than admirable. At least one of his comrades reported he couldn’t do a lick of work and monthly equipment returns show he threw away every article of gear Uncle Sam issued him.
Family legend has it that Dreher was made a teamster on account of his disability and that he took the mules or wagon home to Indiana. Whether or not he went home with a team of mules he did go home, crippled by his service and died seven years later in 1870.
How many years after my great-great-great grandfather Dreher stood upon the grounds now called Antietam National Battlefield did I first stand there? Long before I knew who that Civil War fellow was in the picture at my uncle’s house I knew I felt something special at Antietam, something I don’t feel on any of the other battlefields I’ve visited. Maybe it’s the family connection.
So, today I’m heading down to Antietam again. My old tradition of taking September 17 off to visit the field has lapsed the past two years but I still visit as close to the date as I can and I always stop in Miller’s Cornfield to remember the sacrifice of my many times great grandfather and the 12,400 other defenders of the nation who fell that day. I don’t give much thought to the 10,318 other men who fell there but when the casualties are taken as a whole, and especially when they are visually presented by candles every December, the cost of war boggles my mind.
Tonight I expect to stand in rainsoaked Miller’s Cornfield and remember. Tomorrow, I walk the hallowed ground in a recreation of my forebear’s uniform and pay my own small tribute to he and his friends and all the other Americans who fought and bled on all the other war Septembers in history.
And then I think I’ll get drunk.
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