War is Cruelty

In the Miller Brothers ( a department store, the family business until sold in 1973) warehouse there was a furniture repair/touch-up shop where Mr. Pirkle presided. As furniture came into the warehouse from NC, any damaged pieces which did not qualify for freight line damage claims came to Mr. Pirkle to touch up, repair, return to a saleable condition. At this time Mr. Pirkle was in his middle seventies, drawing Social Security but unwilling to sit at home. Due to his age, he could work as much as he wanted, and not sacrifice his SS check.

Mr. Pirkle had a long and varied work career. During the late twenties and early thirties he had worked in the furniture workshops of the Colonial Williamsburg Restoration. It was in those workrooms he acquired the skills he employed for Miller Brothers in the warehouse. His family had always lived in South Chattanooga and Northern Georgia. One long Monday afternoon, he told me the story his father had told him. In 1863, his father was eight or nine years old. Mr. Pirkle’s father went on a tour of the battlefield at Chickamauga a day or so after fighting had moved off north to Chattanooga. The grandfather of my Mr. Pirkle wanted to show his son what war brought. That afternoon in the warehouse, Mr. Pirkle told of his father’s story, of the many, many bloated horse carcasses they passed. Then the father and son came to a trampled-down area where a pile of amputated arms and legs were piled like a small pyramid. This, they understood, was the site of a field hospital. In the heat and urgency of battle, the universal remedy for a serious limb wound was amputation. The large, heavy, slow-moving projectile commonly fired by Civil War era military rifles was a minie ball, which struck with such accumulated projectile force that bone was shattered into unrecoverable pieces. Faced with an unbridgeable gap in the bone, the surgeons elected to amputate.

This story comes to mind now because of the nature of the casualties in the Iraq disaster presided over by G.W. Bush & Co. The “insurgency,” a.k.a. continuation of the war, features the extensive use of mines and improvised mines to blow up military vehicles full of our soldiers. Because only a minority of these vehicles are armored in any way, a high proportion of the wounds suffered involve amputations. As William Tecumseh Sherman said, “War is cruelty, you cannot refine it.”