Afterword

This book is about the gritty, devastating¹ effects of war — in this case, the often- dissected²

American Civil War—but isn’t about officers, battle statistics, or strategies. It’s about young

Confederate soldiers without rank, infantrymen on foot for as many as a thousand miles a year

carrying out war’s grimmest chores, sometimes for a cause they didn’t support. The story places

its protagonist³, Tom Smiley, on the Southern side because that’s where conditions were

harshest, the cause hardest to justify⁴, and the site where most of the killing⁵ happened.

I was barely an adult during the Vietnam War, when many American soldiers were injured

and killed for a cause with little connection to their lives. I wondered if the same was true for

Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. I suspect most of the Southern combatants were

racists, but only one in four families in the South owned enslaved people and had anything to

lose if the institution was abolished.

Wars are often instigated⁷ by a proportionately small number of people whose wealth makes

them politically and socially powerful, some of whom become military officers. Most white

Southern wealth at that time was related either directly or indirectly⁸ to owning and selling Black

humans. This white group was hell-bent on retaining a barbaric institution to enrich themselves

and avoid daily labor⁹. And ordinary citizens were the majority of those who paid the terrible

price of death, injury, PTSD, and destruction of property. Men like Tom quickly became cogs in

a vast military machine. The Confederacy established a draft in April 1862, ten months after the

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