A Funny Little War Story

"Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."

                                                                                                - Tim O'Brien

                                                                                    The Things They Carried

 

           

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uthor and novelist Tim O'Brien knows only too well the source and power of his stories. He served in the Vietnam War from 1968 through 1970, and in his novel The Things They Carried he tells of the tools and the burdens that he and other American soldiers took into battle, and then brought home with them afterward.

Snapshots of sweethearts and salt pills, love letters and nightmares - soldiers throughout history have carried around countless things tucked away in their pockets and in their minds; some good, some not-so-good.

            In this book that reads like both a novel and  memoir, O'Brien goes on to say that as a writer he gets his material whenever and wherever he can find it. Well, not long ago I found an interesting little memento that another war veteran carried with him into battle. In 1864.

Alonzo Miller was a Private in the 12th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, 3rd Division of the 17th Army Corps. A resident of Prescott, Wisconsin, he volunteered for enlistment in January of 1864. Twice wounded in battle, Miller fought in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, the Battle of Atlanta, the Savannah Campaign and the Campaign of the Carolinas before being honorably discharged in July of 1865 after war's end.

Private Miller kept a 'Daily Miniature Diary' (published by Kiggins & Kellogg of New York) for each year of his time in service, and through my father's bloodlines I eventually came to inherit those diaries. Each book is small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, or certainly the shirt pocket of a Union soldier. The black leather casings are worn but remarkably intact given their age and significant mileage. Within those tight little pages Miller faithfully recorded the events of every single day, all in fine pencil, each word crammed together and filling every page.

            Miller was 25 years old in 1864, almost an old man by that war’s standards. Throughout that year he describes plainly but honestly a life that any veteran of any war would understand plenty well. The endless marching (often 12 to 15 miles per day as his Regiment made its way down through Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia), the food, the common boredom and uncommon camaraderie of life in an army camp.  And, yes, the deadly confrontations of battle, though detail in this regard is quite sparse in his diaries.

            But what excited me more, at least initially, was what I found tucked away, almost hidden, in a back pouch of his 1864 diary. It was a newspaper clipping, neatly cut out and folded, as brown and brittle as ancient parchment, though unfortunately there was no date or name of the newspaper included in the clipping. This was the talisman the young soldier chose to carry with him throughout that long hard year of 1864.

Entitled A Dutchman's Complaint, it's a short piece of fiction, maybe a thousand words, told by a fifty-year-old character with the outlandish name of Gottlieb Klobberyoss. Right away one sees the intended parody of dialect and demeanor when Herr Klobberyoss slurps down another drink and says:

            "I dinks much about da war und da draft, und da rebils, and all about dese dings. I dinks about 'em more as about anyding else….De odder day begins de draft. Dat bodders me agin…Ven I gets tired mit drinkin on my own stoop, I goes down to Hans Butterfoos's tavern, und I drinks dere, und I tells my opinion. 

Tue to his word, he goes to the tavern and drinks some more and offers more unflattering opinions of "rebil sojers" and Confederate President "Sheff Davis." The story goes on to a conclusion that is none too dramatic or humorous, at least not by today's standards. I myself have read the story several times and still can't say exactly what the punch line is.

But that's not the point. The real mystery here, the real story in my mind, is what was it about this farcical conversation that made Alonzo Miller think it important enough to carry with him every single day, when any one of those days could have been his last?  

Maybe he pulled it out and read it whenever the dull life of an infantryman overtook him. Maybe it reminded him of what life could still be like outside of war. Maybe he just needed a chuckle now and then - understandable enough given the circumstances of his life back then.

Whatever the reason was for Private Miller, it must have worked because after the war he went on to raise a family and live a productive life for another fifty years before dying in 1917.

            So while the men who once wrote and read the words on that tiny scrap of paper are all but unknown to anyone now, a very small part of who they were and what they did still remains. And now the tale of A Dutchman's Complaint has outlived that war, or at least those who fought in it, by a century and a half. I’d like to think in some way that does make this a funny little war story after all.

 

 

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Alonzo Miller 1

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