A man said that in The Lonesome Duck yesterday. Said it loud, said it clear, for all to hear, only he wasn’t talking to all. He was talking to the young man that had guided him to a chair and got him a drink. He wasn’t to know the rest of us were gawking at his sightless eyes and the knot in his sleeve where an arm used to be.
Men like him are entitled to say their piece; the rest of us have to be careful. Nothing stirs people up more than the war. A wrong word in the wrong company can get a man’s head busted, no matter what uniform he wore. I’ve seen it happen more times than I care to remember. Asking a man whose side he was on ain’t a question that needs asking in these parts, but in places north and west of here I’ve always answered the same; my side. Yup, my side, though it ain’t the whole truth.
Back in 61 I was with a bunch of Texan boys and a couple of thousand steers, on a drive to the mining camps out west. A hard way to make a living, sure, but I got three meals a day and I liked the pay. Reckon I must have, since it was my fourth time in three years. If the war hadn’t come along we’d have just gone back to Texas for the next herd, but the war had come along and we weren’t even sure if there be a next herd when we returned to El Paso in December.
Since the only beef going anywhere was in support of an army on the move, we were out of a job. Course we were none too worried about that. The bugle was calling and when a marching band paraded through the town, it was easy to get swept along. I guess the pretty girls outside the recruiting office clinched it. We figured the war wouldn’t last long anyhow; in six months we’d be back herding beef.
Private Valance, B Company, 4th Texas Mounted Rifles and his buddies didn’t get off to the best of starts. A corporal from D Company rubbed us up the wrong way and there was big trouble when one of the boys knocked him out. Shelby Tate, our trail boss, spoke for us when we were summoned to see the officer in command. I don’t recall the officer’s name but wary of damaging morale at a critical time, he dropped the charges against us. Instead, he promoted Shelby to sergeant and made him personally responsible for keeping us in line. It was a smart move. Shelby was our natural leader and we were glad to fall in behind him.
Just a month later we were heading north along the Rio Grande. Setting aside the fact that we were two thousand strong and fixing to give the blue bellies a hiding, it was just like being on a cattle drive again, with mules, cattle and supply wagons strung out as far as the eye could see; only we never set out on a cattle drive in the middle of winter when it was so danged blasted cold.
War ain’t about marching bands and pretty girls, and flags fluttering on the breeze. It’s about cannon and gunfire, and screaming and crying, and the will to survive when there’s carnage all around. When danger’s closing in from all sides you’ve no time to worry about dead bodies, or the man with no legs that’s bleeding to death nearby; you only see his unused ammunition. Your only concern is to keep reloading and pulling that trigger, ‘cause that’s your one chance of getting out alive.
The time for thinking comes later, when the fighting’s over and the smoke has cleared. A man learns a lot about himself in battle, and I learned an awful lot at Valverde Ford. Victory was ours but it came at a price; 36 dead, 150 wounded and the loss of around 300 horses and mules. B Company counted eight men wounded and one man dead; the man that had his legs blown off. That was Shelby Tate.
Losing Shelby was hard to take, as was the 4th getting busted to infantry. Our horses were needed to bolster losses elsewhere, they said. There was some truth in that, but there wasn’t a man amongst us who didn’t feel like we’d been given the dirtiest end of a long dirty stick. When the brigade moved out we were left behind with orders to bring up the rear with as many supply wagons as we could. Since we didn’t have half the mules and horses we needed, an awful lot of supply wagons got burned to the ground. A crying shame, sure, but we couldn’t leave them for the enemy.
Some said we were bound for Albuquerque. Others said Santa Fe. Made no difference to me, I was bound for neither. One life is all we get and I wasn’t risking mine in an infantry charge at Albuquerque, Santa Fe or any place else. I’d seen enough of the war already. You can be whatever you resolve to be, Stonewall Jackson once said, so I resolved I’d be a deserter and get the hell out of there. Weren’t nothing to it. Next time I was on guard duty I just borrowed a horse and snuck off in the night.
Running out on my friends bothered me for a time, but when a man makes his own decisions, he has to live by them and I got no regrets. Securing my very own dishonorable discharge was the smartest thing I ever did. Like I said; I was on my side.
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