Shooting Soldiers and Other Ways of Dying

Via The New York Review of Books, "Someone Else's Children"

A friend recently recommended Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering to me. The book explores the ways in which the Civil War forced people on both sides of the conflict to reconsider their relationship to death. Rather than organize the book chronologically, Gilpin Faust chooses to organize it according to a series of themes: "Death," "Killing," "Burying," "Naming," "Realizing," Believing and Doubting," "Accounting," and "Numbering." I've only made it through the first few pages, but I've been struck by the effect of organizing the book in this way - drawing on a huge range of primary documents, the book is both gripping and challenging.

But it was because I was reading the book that my attention was piqued by a review of Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography that begins:

My wife and I have two sons, aged eighteen and twenty-two. Both have registered for the Selective Service, as the law requires. (“Our objective is to register you,” the official letter reminded them, “not to have you prosecuted.”) We don’t have a clear idea of Tommy’s or Nicholas’s views regarding military service; we hope that circumstances won’t force us to find out. None of us knows any men or women currently serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. They are someone else’s children. We watch news reports of wounded veterans learning to walk with prosthetic limbs. Recent stories about body parts mislaid at the military mortuary at Dover Air Force Base fill us with outrage. Still, for many of us, it is a general, not an individualized outrage.

There are all sorts of contrasts to be drawn between our present and the Civil War, but one - drawing on Gilpin Faust - would be to point to how the encounter with death during that war has become so peripheral to American discourse during our ongoing conflicts.