Here's Hoping

During the American Civil War, it was not uncommon for a whole town’s worth of young men to disappear on the battlefield. This happened because regiments were made up of volunteers from the same city; there was a regiment from Flint, Michigan, that was commanded by Flint’s mayor and whose health was looked after by the town doctor. This was good for morale and cohesion, but led to problems when the regiment, or a company of the regiment, got into a tight spot on a battlefield, and then word would reach home that there simply were no more young men left in certain small towns.

This historical memory came to mind yesterday with reports that a squad made up of Marine reservists from central Ohio has now suffered 100% casualties in the Iraq war. This Marine squad of fourteen soldiers spent last weekend fighting some insurgents holed up in a house in a town called Ubaydi. Then, on Wednesday, the squad’s armored humvee ran hit an improvised explosive device, and that was it. Four dead, ten wounded seriously enough to be evacuated. The squad, in the words of embedded Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer, simply “ceased to be.”

We’re still a long way from Civil War-level casualties in this war, at least when it comes to American soldiers, but there is something disturbing about the fact that the Marine Corps now has to reorganize because a squad has “ceased to be.” According to the New York Daily News, blue-uniformed Marine officers are fanning out today across central Ohio, to tell family members what has happened.

Today, incidentally, is also the anniversary of the death of the last American soldier in the Civil War. John Jefferson Williams of Portland, Indiana, died on May 13, 1865, in Palmito Ranch, Texas. This was after Appomattox, when the only Confederates still fighting were holdouts in places like Texas. Of course, some argue that the Civil War actually lasted into the twentieth century, and that the Confederates simply became the insurgents of the Ku Klux Klan that terrorized the South for generations.

This is all just to say that it’s not always easy to tell when a war ends, because the death that follows in the wake of a war is often indistinguishable from the death caused by the war itself. For this reason, it’s probably best not to say when a war is over. Really, the only thing to do is hope that no one else dies.