On September 17th, 1862, roughly 100,000 Union and Confederate forces met in conflict on an unsuspecting field in western Maryland. That day resulted in the loss of nearly 23,000 lives over the course of 12 hours. Today, it is known as the Battle of Antietam (or the Battle of Sharpsburg depending on who you ask in the South) and, with nearly four-times as many American casualties as D-Day, it is commonly acknowledged as the single bloodiest day in United States history.
The battle itself is considered a stalemate by most military historians, but, beyond the unparalleled bloodshed, is was undeniably a defining moment in the war. Militarily, it marked the repelling of a Southern invasion of Northern soil and, civilly, it preceded the publishing of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in Confederate states.
I visited the site of that battle two weeks ago.
Today, the battlefield is all but indiscernible as a place of unrivaled carnage and death. The rolling hills and farmland outside of Sharpsburg, Maryland sit serenely undisturbed, save for the countless regimental monuments, descriptive roadside signs, and well-preserved, makeshift remnants of that fateful day. Every day, a modest, yet steady flow of visitors arrive at the National Park Service visitor center, complete with a small theater, museum and gift shop, to begin their slow, solemn exploration of the battleground. It’s safe to say that each of them leave that experience profoundly changed, just as I did.
Now, I could sit here and do a disservice in attempting to describe the battle as I was able to understand it through a short documentary, a handful of exhibits and a self-guided driving tour, but I think the perspectives of those who were there that day would be the only ones who could do it justice…
"I was lying on my back, supported on my elbows, watching the shells explode overhead and speculating as to how long I could hold up my finger before it would be shot off, for the very air seemed full of bullets, when the order to get up was given, I turned over quickly to look at Col. Kimball, who had given the order, thinking he had become suddenly insane."
Lt. Matthew J. Graham, Company H, 9th New York Volunteers
I had just got myself pretty comfortable when a bomb burst over me and completely deafened me. I felt a blow on my right shoulder and my jacket was covered with white stuff. I felt mechanically whether I still had my arm and thank God it was still whole. At the same time I felt something damp on my face; I wiped it off. It was bloody. Now I first saw that the man next to me, Kessler, lacked the upper part of his head, and almost all his brains had gone into the face of the man next to him, Merkel, so that he could scarcely see. Since any moment the same could happen to anyone, no one thought much about it.
Christoph Niederer, 20th New York Infantry, 6th Corps
Civil War Misc. Collection, USAMHI
Tired and sleepy we still march on, and as we come in proximity of the battle ground the scores of wounded passing to the rear remind us that bloody work is going on. A little further on, to the left of the pike, we halt & “load at will.” No sooner done, then in again. The enemy’s batteries give us shot & shell in abundance causing many muscular contractions in the spinal column of our line. But all the dodging did not save us. Occasionally a shell, better aimed than the rest would crash through our line making corpses & mutilated trunks.
"A man lying upon the ground asked for drink--I stooped to give it, and having raised him with my right hand, was holding the cup to his lips with my left, when I felt a sudden twitch of the loose sleeve of my dress--the poor fellow sprang from my hands and fell back quivering in the agonies of death--a ball had passed between my body--and the right arm which supported him--cutting through the sleeve, and passing through his chest from shoulder to shoulder."
Clara Barton, Founder of the Red Cross
"I recall a Union soldier lying near the Dunker Church with his face turned upward, and his pocket Bible open upon his breast. I lifted the volume and read the words: 'Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.' Upon the fly-leaf were the words, 'We hope and pray that you may be permitted by kind Providence, after the war is over, to return."
Charles Carlton Coffin, Army Correspondent
Above is the sight of the The Sunken Road or “Bloody Lane” where some 5,500 soldiers died in three hours of morning combat.
It is where I spent the most time reflecting.
It's undeniable that we're still confronted by the legacy of our country's historic mid-nineteenth century schism today thanks to generations of failed reconstruction and reconciliation efforts. Especially with the advent of social media, we bear witness to instances of hate, intolerance and difference across the relative identities of the North and the South daily. Unfortunately, we're often powerless to cause change and are just left frustrated and hurt from behind our keyboards and screens whenever we choose to engage. This results in building up our own sides, furthering the divide and preparing for things to get worse before they get better.
For me, the Battle of Antietam serves a humbling reminder of how far our civil society can decline into mutual destruction. The division we're experiencing as a country and society right now pales in comparison to the mutual destruction at this point in history, but history has been known to repeat itself and, if we don't do the work to reconcile now, it just might.
Exactly a year before the concept of why [here] was conceived, I visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and Khmer Rouge Killing Fields in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on Christmas Eve.
I admittedly took very few pictures of these places out of respect and reverence for the lives lost and the societal trauma incurred there during the four years of violence and genocide in Cambodia, but the two images below represent those two places for me.
Located in the heart of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, Tuol Sleng was a secondary school converted into a prison where thousands of Cambodians were imprisoned, tortured and executed by the Khmer Rouge regime. Offices were turned into interrogation rooms, classrooms were converted into cell blocks and the open courtyard was well-maintained. While I was there, I could only take short, intentional breaths and attempt to calm my mind to avoid myself from being overwhelmed by the visit.
It wasn’t until I went to the Museo Memoria y Tolerencia in Mexico City the following summer and experienced a chest-pounding panic attack upon seeing an image of those converted classroom cell blocks, that I would grasp how much that visit had affected me.
Located on the outskirts of the capital, the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields is a preserved site, the size of a small, woodland summer camp, where approximately 1.3 million men, women and children were executed during the genocide. The picture above is one of 20,000 mass graves that were identified at the site. I left a bracelet I had been wearing on one of the fence posts.
More than Auschwitz or Hiroshima (which I had visited in previous months), this place affected me because a hundred meters or so away from this grave, there was a Chankiri tree where infants, whose parents had been accused of crimes against the Khmer Rouge, would be executed by swinging their bodies and smashing their skulls on it. In Hiroshima, the United States used an atomic bomb. In the Holocaust, the Nazis used gas chambers and guns. In Cambodia, the members of the regime used rudimentary farming tools and their bare hands to take the lives of innocent countrymen and women.
That day in Cambodia, I learned about how a rural, working class populace mobilized to rise up against their urban, educated peers leading to the genocide of nearly 3 million Cambodians by their own people.
The rise of the Khmer Rouge was preceded by the United States’ indiscriminate carpet bombing along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which traversed the borders of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, during The Vietnam War. The resulting civilian deaths, social upheaval, and economic turmoil that rural Cambodians faced along the eastern border of the country made them easy to radicalize and mobilize. Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, capitalized upon this by proliferating their anxieties into revolutionary action.
The Khmer Rouge’s successful overthrow of the ruling, globalized Cambodian elites was peaceful and it only took a few days. They moved into the country’s cities, overtook them, and displaced the population into rural farming communes that made them easy to monitor, manipulate and, ultimately, murder.
From afar, I reflected on the turbulent state of the United States and, with our exceptional rates of gun ownership, economic inequality and anxiety, and ideological and geographic difference, I was overwhelmed by the potential of us heading down a similar path. Our precursors wouldn’t be the same if our country had an uprising - the collateral damages of our unjust, exploitative society aren’t as easy to identify as the casualties of carpet bombing - but it’s safe to say that they exist.
It’s over a year later and, now that I’m back in the states, my concern has only grown. In the last six months alone, I’ve spent time in the three most populous US cities, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, I’ve spent time in our capital, and I’ve driven all over and spent significant time in the rural parts of our country; the only thing that’s clear to me from those experiences is that we don’t understand one another despite living in realities which are more alike than different. To that point, I wish our divide was as easy to identify as the North and the South, but it’s not.
There isn’t a single thing that we can point to right now which is driving a wedge between us (no, Trump is just a proxy), but the facts that the United States averages a mass shooting every day (with white supremacy as the primary perpetrator), our rural farmers’ way of life is being threatened by both corporate farming and climate change-induced natural disasters, and urbanization is simultaneously displacing poor urban populations while draining poor rural communities of human capital and resources are all indicators of our society’s tenuous stability and civility right now.
I don’t recommend watching this on a night bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh while sharing a twin-sized bed with a young Cambodian guy like it did, but you can watch First They Killed My Father on Netflix, if you want to learn more about the experience of the Genocide.
In the Appalachian foothills just outside of Johnson City lies an unsuspecting roadside home that has been re-purposed into a Thai food restaurant, Thai-Am. It is owned and run by an American man and his Thai wife who, both middle-aged, split their time between properties they own in Tennessee and Thailand. From what I gathered, he works in the chemical industry while she runs the restaurant providing lunch and dinner service four days a week.
Last Saturday, my friend Bryce and I decided to go there for dinner.
We arrived about forty minutes before closing to find a chalkboard sign (which Bryce can be seen pointing to in the picture above) that said, “Sorry Out of food”. We decided to go in and ask if they had any food left anyways.
PRO TIP: ALWAYS ASK IF THEY STILL HAVE FOOD
The waitress met us at the entry way to the restaurant with some reticence before asking the owner if she had enough food to make something for us. After looking us over, she decided she had enough shrimp, vegetables and noodles left to whip us up a hearty serving of what she labelled as pad thai. We were grateful to be fed and for the free Thai teas they gave us.
We finished our meals, dinner service ended and we went up to pay.
The ice-breaker that I am, I mentioned that Bryce and I had spent a month in Thailand a year ago and really appreciated the subtle return to Thai comfort food. The conversation that ensued began with the sharing of obscure food stories from across Southeast Asia and ended on the verge of political discourse, but most importantly it helped me explore contemporary applications of the historical events referenced above.
During the first part of the conversation, we all gained familiarity with one another, as strangers often do when given the opportunity, over the simple concept of food. Then, at some point, things stopped being polite…and started getting real. #RealWorld
The one snide personal observation I’ll make is that it’s fascinating how quickly a self-assured middle-aged white man can sound like a Fox News pundit when he starts to share his viewpoints. That being said, I’m grateful that the owner decided to share his.
His commentary ranged from distrust in congress (even including an unsolicited shot at AOC🙄) to how monocropping would ultimately lead to the demise of our agricultural industry before the concerns about climate change could be realized. I chose not to disagree with him; taking it as an opportunity to learn from both his educated and biased perspectives, respectively. Providing him with that personal space is what ultimately allowed him to take the next steps in sharing his personal beliefs on the state of our country.
I think the most novel insight that he offered was that we hadn’t had a [declared] war fought on our own soil since The Civil War and we were due for one. Given the appropriate opportunity, I might have argued that the labor and civil rights movements or even the War on Drugs would complicate that assertion, but, for the sake of where my head has been lately, I gave him the space to elaborate.
What he shared wasn’t a threat; it was just an informed observation. One that was humbling because he followed his claim by asserting that we weren’t ready for whatever conflict might ensue. He felt that our decision-makers and our people were so far removed from the realities of the world and, as a result of not having to focus on survival for so many generations, were focusing on and arguing about things that didn’t matter. Again, I didn’t necessarily agree with him, but if I hadn’t listened to him, I wouldn’t have come to the conclusion that I did.
His assertion illuminated a tension between survival-oriented (to use his wording) and justice-oriented (to use mine) political thinking for me. A tension that I think is vitally important to embrace even before attempting to understand it. Despite our clear differences and seemingly insurmountable societal divide right now, the biggest threat to the preservation of our civil society is the deterioration of our social fabric; the ever-increasing inability to coexist in the space of that tension. The stereotyping, the segregation, the othering and the alienating, the call out and cancel cultures, the blizzard of “snowflakes” across the political spectrum, and the desire to shout over and disrespect one another rather than to shut up and listen are ultimately what I think is tearing us apart.