The need to keep revisiting history

Editor's note: The following column was originally published in the May 7, 2004, edition of the The Tribune in Ames, IA, and was republished with permission.

I attended a training seminar this week at American Press Institute in Reston, Va. Its title was "High Performance Leadership." As an object lesson, and a bit of relief from days of lecture, on Tuesday we toured the battlefield at Gettysburg. Our group of newspaper managers was led by a pair of retired Marine colonels, historians who use the battlefield in lectures to cadets. The depth of their knowledge was inexhaustible. Stories and strategy brought the battle to life. It was humbling enough being on sacred ground. Their narrative fleshed out the ghosts.

But of course, the lessons of leadership were why we were there. From the organic Army of the Potomac, trusting in its second tier of commanders, willing to take risks, disobeying orders to fortuitous ends, to the top-down aristocracy of the Confederates, headstrong, failing to follow directions, convinced of their own infallibility, we squeezed drops of truth we hope can be applied to newsrooms across the country. "Bayonets," I might have cried upon mounting my office mid-week. "Show them the cold steel."

The climax of the tour was a hike across destiny. Pickett's Charge, the most memorable charge of the battle, lost Gettysburg to the South and began the long slide toward reunification. After two days of intense fighting, General Lee decided to strike the Union Army in the center of its line along Cemetery Ridge. The gamble would cut the Yankees in two, block their supply lines and let Lee dig in between the defenders and Washington, D.C., threatening the capital.

Cannons exchanged fire for two hours. At 3 o'clock in the afternoon of July 3, 1863, approximately 12,000 Confederate soldiers set foot across a mile of open field toward the stone wall where the Union was dug in. Wave upon wave of soldiers marched forward on the double-quick.

When they came into range, the Union responded with canister shot — tin cans filled with iron balls that turned cannons into enormous shotguns. Soldiers were cut down in wide swaths. "Closed out their medical history," our colonel concluded with bureaucratic understatement. Blood soaked the earth. The Union army held. In the end, 23,045 Union troops and 20,688 Confederate troops were killed, wounded, captured or missing - nearly the entire population of Ames. Accounts later said the stench of the bodies could be apprehended 10 miles away.

On Tuesday, the field was bathed in sunlight. Pungent shoots of wild garlic sprang from the ground. Tour buses sallied along the road where 141 years ago cavalry paced. In windbreakers and tennis shoes, out of step, with no suggestion of a line, 28 newspaper managers stepped across the muddy field from the Confederate stronghold of the woods to the Union positions at The Angle and Ziegler's Grove. Imaginations raced as our colonels described the decimation of the advance. The lessons in strategy indeed are worthy and enlightening. This immersion in inhumanity, on the other hand, is another lesson entirely.

Death on that scale is unimaginable, no part of my reality. I've got an old dog now, with us for 16 years. She still makes it up and down the steps. But I know that in not so long I'll be the one who has to take her in for a shot in the paw. My parents are still as young as they feel, but I know that in some years they'll be gone, too. I lost my sister-in-law to cancer last year. My boys are just beginning their precarious flaps-down ascent from the runway. All these things worry me. But I know that for many others in our country war weighs heavier.

Here in the newsroom, reporter Jayne Bullock carries a brand-new countenance — her son is back this week from 16 months in Iraq. Many others, though, are not so fortunate. And nationally, our leadership is called into question. Which side of history will our strategy and tactics reflect when the colonels of the future recount our battles?

Sen. Charles Grassley, in his polite way, described the debacle of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison "a darn poor projection of ... moral authority." I agree with his conclusion, but with all due respect, when it comes to war, the word is not darn, the word is damn, with all of its implications.

We are damned without history. I'm grateful for the chance to reflect on Gettysburg. I'm even more grateful to be safe here in a strong, unified society, where ideas may tear across fields in cannonade, but where we can put down politics by other means. North and South, conservative or liberal, Christian or Muslim, copy editor or reporter, city council member or neighborhood watch captain, we have learned over and over that we can connect the ideas.

We must keep revisiting history to remind ourselves.