How far is five miles of coffins?

The distance from my house in Antietam to Sharpsburg is almost five miles. I never thought much about that distance until I was recently reading an article on the 4,000th death in Iraq, and someone calculated that those 4,000 coffins laid end to end would stretch some five miles. A peculiar method for measuring our country's dead, I thought.

 

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This issue of death is a very personal matter to people. One thing for sure, grieving can be a very difficult part of living.

Drew Gilpin Faust has written a riveting thesis on death in her book "This Republic of Suffering." It is a book that examines every aspect of death, and I mean "every" aspect of death during the Civil War in which some 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died. It seems that this war actually taught us to be concerned about counting our war dead.

Faust provides vivid insight and description of war as soldiers marched into battle, looking and preparing themselves for the "Good Death."

She looks at the soldiers' letters home to loved ones - the horrors of war described first hand by the soldier, those amputations, suffering, pain and the miseries of war.

The many stories of parents, wives, children, and sisters left behind to grieve a lifetime for a loved one. A tale of a father who searched for his son until he found him on the battlefield and actually retrieved the bullet from his son's skeleton which had killed him. The father carried this bullet with him for the rest of his life.

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