Essays
Pancho and Lefty
Nature or nurture? The moms controlled half the nature, but all the nurture. Whatever the explanation, these stepbrothers of the same father but different mothers sure turned out different.
After the death of our nonagenarian cat, we decided to buy a dog. Since kittenhood, my wife had received all the cat’s love and affection. If such aloof and independent creatures are really capable of love and affection. He would only acknowledge my existence with her gone and him hungry.
I longed for a puppy. My wife’s sister had a little dog who lived happily in a Las Vegas apartment, trained to go on a puppy pad. But big city condo living with both of us working would still pose problems. Should we look into doggy day care?
After research and discussion with the vet’s staff, old friends after many visits with the cat, we decided to adopt a Mi-Ki, a mostly-Maltese toy breed created as a calm and healthy companion dog. In a life-altering moment, our breeder said, “Why not take two? They can keep each other company.” We named them Pancho and Lefty after the Willie Nelson song about the assassination of Pancho Villa by a made-up character called Lefty. Our Lefty bore no resemblance to the scoundrel of the song.
Our nicknames for them reflected their personalities. Pancho became the Terrorist, the Miscreant, the Little Criminal. We called Lefty Zen Master and Sweetheart.
Pancho, agile and athletic, raced about and leapt on and off the furniture. Lefty, overweight, a trencherman, plodded around. The sound of the refrigerator door opening would bring them both running. Precious, pleading black eyes often defeated our resolve to keep Lefty on a diet.
Pancho had a mean streak and sharp teeth he did not hesitate to use. He sometimes assaulted Lefty with no provocation, like a little black Ninja, a canine hitman. Amiable blond Lefty never bit anybody, except Pancho when defending himself.
Despite his aggressiveness, Pancho was a coward, easily spooked. Lefty knew no fear. Encountering a bigger, barking dog out on a walk, Lefty confronted, Pancho ran. At the sound of thunder, Pancho would tremble and try to hide. Lefty hardly noticed.
Pancho knew two notes: bark and growl. Lefty had a vocabulary. He would not only bark and growl, he purred when happy, whimpered when he needed something, huffed, snorted, and made a noise like an old door creaking when he was hungry.
A father of three, I used to laugh at people talking about their surrogate children, their fur babies. No more.
Several years on, as consoler-in-chief Joe Biden often said, when I walk by the mahogany boxes on the mantel containing their ashes it brings a smile to my lips rather than a tear to my eye.
Mountain School
The essay Mountain School, about my experiences as the medical support for the Vermont Army National Guard’s Mountain School, including a memorable bit about a sergeant and his goose, appeared in Military Experience and the Arts in 2023. Here is the opening paragraph and the link is provided below.
As the airliner closed in on Montpelier, a snowy landscape stretched toward the hulking silhouette of the Green Mountains in the distance, a vista radically different from the flat piney woods and marshlands of my native south Georgia. My destination lay nestled somewhere in those mountains—Camp Ethan Allen, home of the Vermont Army National Guard’s mountain warfare school, just outside the small town of Jericho. As someone who spent his youth on water skis and never put on snow skis until age thirty, I felt apprehensive about this assignment I had volunteered for. Second guessing myself. What did I know about mountains?
Flouting the Rules
There should be a rule in medicine: cardiologists shouldn’t have heart attacks, oncologists shouldn’t get cancer, lupus should spare rheumatologists. Why? Because they know too much. They can see what’s coming. They know the complications. They know the drug side effects.
Following this rule, neurologists should never develop ALS.
Unfortunately, there is no such rule.
Other rules also apply. ALS only affects nice people. The disease has a peculiar predilection to attack nice people and spare mean people. And ALS loves the ironic twist.
Another rule: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. This maxim reminds physicians that common things are common. A patient with fever and a cough probably has a viral upper respiratory infection, not anthrax. The aphorism is all well and good, except when the horse is an inexorably progressive and inevitably fatal disease—when the horse is ALS. Then you have to be absolutely certain this thing that appears to be a horse is not a zebra in disguise.
We know that certain diseases can mimic the clinical picture of ALS. Some of these mimickers are treatable. The evaluation of an ALS patient includes a search for conditions known to mimic it, but all of them are rare and the search is usually futile.
A new mimicker appeared on the scene in the late 1980’s, a condition called multifocal motor neuropathy (MMN). Researchers from Johns Hopkins University described two patients with a disorder involving the motor fibers of multiple peripheral nerves in the upper extremities, sparing sensory fibers.1 Both patients had presented with painless, progressive, asymmetric upper extremity weakness, and both were initially diagnosed as having ALS. But their nerve conduction studies showed striking abnormalities not typical of ALS.
Temporal dispersion refers to the normal tendency of things moving at different velocities to spread out over distance. Runners of differing footspeed will separate further from each other the longer the race. The same phenomenon normally occurs with a compound muscle action potential (CMAP) because not all motor nerve fibers conduct at the same velocity. Conduction block refers to the failure of a nerve potential to transmit, analogous to a runner spraining an ankle and never finishing the race. Both temporal dispersion and conduction block affect the amplitude of the CMAP, and distinguishing between the two may prove difficult.
The patients in the Hopkins paper describing MMN had conduction block in the involved nerves on nerve conduction studies. Conduction block never occurs in ALS. These patients also had high titers of antibodies to GM1ganglioside.
Crucially, the Hopkins MMN patients responded to treatment with cyclophosphamide. So, the Hopkins researchers had reported patients initially thought to have ALS who had conduction block on nerve conduction studies and antibodies to GM1 ganglioside, and who responded to treatment with cyclophosphamide.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, papers appeared with titles such as: Chronic multifocal demyelinating neuropathy simulating motor neuron disease, Multifocal motor neuropathy mimicking motor neuron disease and Motor neuropathies mimicking amyotrophic lateral sclerosis/motor neuron disease.2–4 In a large Irish study, the most common ALS mimic was MMN.5
Neurologists around the world became obsessed with not missing MMN in patients who appeared to have ALS.
The American Association of Neuromuscular and Electrodiagnostic Medicine (AANEM) convened a panel to develop consensus criteria for distinguishing between temporal dispersion and true conduction block. The head of the panel and lead author of the paper that followed was Dr. Richard K. Olney, the Director of the ALS Treatment and Research Center at UCSF.6 Rick was a stellar physician and researcher and an esteemed colleague, highly regarded yet unpretentious and always amiable. He was universally recognized as a very nice guy.
The conduction block paper was published in 1999. In 2003, Rick noticed problems with his right leg. His doctors at first thought he had a lumbar disk herniation and he underwent surgery, but the weakness progressed and Rick soon knew he had ALS.
Rick was cared for in his own ALS center by physicians he had trained. Even as his personal illness progressed, he continued to study it.7 He enrolled as the first patient in a clinical trial he had designed before his diagnosis. Rick Olney died in 2012, at age sixty-four. The AANEM honored his memory by creating the Richard K. Olney Lecture, given annually at its association meeting.
Rick survived eight years. Another ALS researcher, Dr. Lisa Krivickas of Harvard, wasn’t as lucky. Lisa and I were colleagues on the Board of Directors of the American Board of Electrodiagnostic Medicine. From the time Lisa told us in a board meeting that she had ALS until she was gone was only a little over two years. She was forty-five. The disease had taken her mother when Lisa was young.
In 2017, Dr. Rahul Desikan, a prominent researcher in the field of neurodegenerative diseases, including ALS, at UCSF, found he had ALS. He died in July 2019 of a rapidly progressive form of the disease. He was forty-one.
It almost seems as if the disease is an evil, sentient entity intent on tracking down and eliminating the specific people trying to find a cure for it. It appears to have license to flagrantly flout the rules.
References
1. Pestronk A, Cornblath DR, Ilyas AA, Baba H, et al. A treatable multifocal motor neuropathy with antibodies to GM1 ganglioside. Ann Neurol. 1988 Jul;24(1):73-8. doi: 10.1002/ana.410240113. PMID: 2843079.
2. Di Bella P, Logullo F, Dionisi L, Danni M, et al. Chronic multifocal demyelinating neuropathy simulating motor neuron disease. Ital J Neurol Sci. 1991 Feb;12(1):113-8. doi: 10.1007/BF02337624. PMID: 2013517.
3. Bentes C, de Carvalho M, Evangelista T, Sales-Luís ML. Multifocal motor neuropathy mimicking motor neuron disease: nine cases. J Neurol Sci. 1999 Oct 31;169(1-2):76-9. doi: 10.1016/s0022-510x(99)00219-1. PMID: 10540011.
4. Evangelista T, Carvalho M, Conceição I, Pinto A, et al. Motor neuropathies mimicking amyotrophic lateral sclerosis/motor neuron disease. J Neurol Sci. 1996 Aug;139 Suppl:95-8. doi: 10.1016/0022-510x(96)00120-7. PMID: 8899666.
5. Traynor BJ, Codd MB, Corr B, Forde C, et al. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis mimic syndromes: a population-based study. Arch Neurol. 2000 Jan;57(1):109-13. doi: 10.1001/archneur.57.1.109. PMID: 10634456.
6. American Association of Electrodiagnostic Medicine, Olney RK. Guidelines in electrodiagnostic medicine. Consensus criteria for the diagnosis of partial conduction block. Muscle Nerve Suppl. 1999;8:S225-9. PMID: 16921636.
7. Olney RK, Lomen-Hoerth C. Exit strategies in ALS: an influence of depression or despair? Neurology. 2005 Jul 12;65(1):9-10. doi: 10.1212/01.wnl.0000171741.00711.b5. PMID: 16009877.
Finally Meeting David
I had been waiting most of my life for this moment, forty-seven of my sixty-five years. We were standing outside the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, waiting to see him, the one I had read about, whose picture I had first seen as a college freshman, the one put on a pedestal by his creator and whose creator I had put on a pedestal. David. The David. All seventeen magnificent alabaster feet of him. He did not disappoint.
I had gone to college from the tobacco fields of South Georgia. Scholarship put me at a university log steps better than my secondary education, at the Harvard of the South as they liked to say. A place with unlimited opportunity. Even basic freshman English class was a different world. It was just English composition, assigned to write an essay. On what? You pick. Always an artist, sketching, doodling, I went to the art books in the library and there stumbled upon Michelangelo. I had never heard of him, never heard of the Sistine chapel, knew nothing.
With a preacher for a father, I had been severely over-churched growing up, so I knew more about the biblical David than any ten normal people. Then I discovered Michelangelo’s David and was transported. I wrote an essay about him. How Michelangelo visualized David in a block of marble at a quarry, how he directed the harvesting of the block himself, then painstakingly freed David from his stone prison.
I found seeing David in the flesh disorienting. In the gallery, the massive scale is breathtaking. Standing back for a full appreciation proved impossible because of the crowd. Getting up close I could see the details, almost touch the marble, but could not see the whole statue. I needed a private viewing.
Years had filled in some details and provided perspective. Maybe David wasn’t as heroic as history would have us believe. Goliath likely suffered from pituitary gigantism. A tumor deep in his brain was pressing on his optic nerves, affecting his vision, and secreting massive amounts of growth hormone, causing a metabolic myopathy. The Philistines’ apex warrior was in fact a half blind, lumbering man with muscle weakness. The nature of Goliath’s visual field deficit made it nearly impossible for him to see David.
David’s slingshot was the ancient equivalent of a high-powered rifle. Mismatch. Advantage David. Doubters should read the account in Malcolm Gladwell’s book David and Goliath and the numerous articles in the medical literature speculating about Goliath’s medical diagnoses.
But David was still worth my lifelong wait.
Driving in the Fog
E. L. Doctorow said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
I recently read Steven King’s On Writing. He believes in jumping in with only the barest plan, only the inkling of an idea, no outline. He just starts and follows the story wherever it leads, like driving in a fog at the limits of your headlights. But not on a road, out across the prairie. He makes it work. According to the book, he has always written this way. It is not the fruit of years of experience, but perhaps of an immense talent.
I have read other writing advice recommending detailed outlines of an entire work, a roadmap with all the gas stops, even writing the last chapter first. Hard to imagine James Joyce doing a detailed outline. Hard to imagine Tolstoy not doing one.
I tend to follow my headlights in the fog but have a plan in my mind about the destination and the general route. But interesting side trips and detours are allowed. Writing about one thing sparks a memory of something else. Researching one aspect of a story unearths a gem or opens an unexpected door. It’s one of the joys of writing. My OCD titer is low and I prefer the loosey goosey approach. There’s always time for editing later.
This might work for a short story but probably not for a full-length book. I have written full length books but those were neurology textbooks. You bet I had a detailed outline. Technical writing and creative writing are different animals.
Clash of the Irish Brigades
The Union Army’s Irish Brigade was decimated during the assaults on Marye’s Heights during the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. About 45% of its members were killed, wounded or went missing. The casualty rate of the Light Brigade in its storied charge during the Crimean War was 40%. But nobody wrote a poem about the Charge of the Irish Brigade. Their sacrifice is forgotten.
The men of the Irish Brigade watched as Confederate sharpshooters picked off the combat engineers trying to lay the pontoon bridges. Dead engineers floating off down the river finally halted construction. Only after several boatloads of Union infantry crossed the river and routed the snipers from their bunkers did work on the bridge resume.
The Battle of Fredericksburg was off to an inauspicious start under the leadership of the hapless Major General Ambrose Burnside. He had planned to outfox Robert E. Lee. Rather than marching directly on Richmond from his current position near Warrenton, he would make a quick sidle east to Fredericksburg, jump across the Rappahannock River on pontoon bridges and race to Richmond from an unexpected direction. But he moved too slowly, and someone forgot to order the bridges. By the time the bridges arrived, the Rebels were there and dug in.
Brigadier General Thomas Meagher, commander of the Irish Brigade, rode his line before the assault, asking his men to put green sprigs in their hats. They found it hard, being December, to scrounge much greenery, but they tried. Then they marched, greenery affixed and carrying their battle flags—emerald green embroidered in gold with a shamrock, a sunburst and an Irish harp. They joined over 100,000 other Federals attacking the Rebel position, but the Irish Brigade may have been in a unique position. While the Civil War pitted American against American, at Fredericksburg it may have also pitted Irishman against Irishman.
Meagher received orders to form a brigade in February 1862. The first units recruited were the all-Irish 63rd, 69th and 88th New York Infantry Regiments. Later, the all-Irish 28th Massachusetts and the mostly Irish 116th Pennsylvania joined the brigade. The unit served until June 1865.
The Irish Brigade became renowned for its battlefield heroics. At the Battle of Malvern Hill in July 1862, a Confederate general reportedly said, “Here comes that damned green flag again.” By the end of the war, the Irish Brigade had sustained the third highest number of battlefield casualties of any brigade in the Union Army. Eleven members received the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Once across the river, the Federals were faced with the Confederate works, half a mile away across a mostly open field, gradually uphill, then a ridge, Marye’s Heights, about fifty feet high. Rebel artillery emplacements stretched along the crest of the heights. The Rebel artillery lay beyond the range of the Union artillery on the opposite side of the river. In the absence of counter-battery fire, the Confederate cannoneers had a free hand.
Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet allegedly asked his artillery chief about needing one more cannon in a particular spot and the man bragged a chicken couldn’t survive on that field when they opened on it. The contention proved close to correct.
A low stone wall stood at the base of Marye’s Heights. A road ran behind the wall. The Rebels had dug out the road and thrown the dirt over the wall. The dirt reinforced the wall and allowed the Rebs to stand along the road and fire from behind the wall.
Among the Confederate units firing from behind the wall was the 24th Georgia Infantry Regiment, the unit most often mentioned as a possible Confederate version of the Union Army’s Irish Brigade. The 24th Georgia was the infantry component of Cobb’s Brigade or Cobb’s Legion, a combined arms unit that consisted of infantry, cavalry and artillery, commanded by Brigadier General Thomas R. R. Cobb. Although far from home, Cobb’s Legion fought as part of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia for most of the war. Members of the unit were present at Appomattox.
After crossing the river, the Federal troops began marching toward the Rebel position. A deep ditch cut through the field part way across. Foot bridges crossed the ditch, but only three and the Rebels had removed all the planking. The Federals had to pick their way across single file stepping on the stringers. Sitting ducks.
As the bluecoats moved forward, Confederate artillery shells started to drop, filling the air with grape shot and cannister, each cannister containing several hundred musket balls. Like being caught in a rainstorm except with lead raindrops. Even the cannonballs that didn’t explode would bounce and careen through the ranks, killing and maiming men.
The Federals pressed forward, trying to dress their lines. With the Union infantry about 150 yards from the wall, the Rebels unleashed massed volleys of musket fire, cutting the bluecoats down like a scythe through a stand of wheat. The clatter of gunfire seemed never to stop, even for an instant. Bodies, arms and legs covered the field. Every conceivable manner of maiming. Men disemboweled. And accompanying the terrifying racket of the gunfire was the constant smack and crack of musket balls hitting flesh and bone. And the screams of those hit.
Orders kept coming to advance but after a while were mostly ignored, regarded as asinine. If anyone tried, others would reach out and pull them down. At one point, orders came to fix bayonets and charge the wall. Nobody moved. None would have gotten within fifty yards. It would have been insanity.
Chaplains moved among the wounded lying on the field that day. One was Father William Corby of the 88th New York. The chaplains were comforting the wounded, hearing confession, administering the sacraments, even giving last rites. Mortal men moving about as if their black uniforms protected them, like a kind of sacred armor. Never flinching. Corby later served as president of the University of Notre Dame. A statue of Corby stands on the Gettysburg battlefield.
Before the Union generals would accept defeat, they had sent men charging at those Confederate works five times. All failures. When they removed the dead afterwards, the corpses nearest the wall had green boxwood sprigs in their caps.
Authorities argue about whether an Irish Brigade existed in the Confederate Army and whether the Union’s Irish Brigade and the Confederacy’s Irish Brigade fought each other at the Battle of Fredericksburg. The alleged fight between the two Irish Brigades played prominently in the 2003 movie Gods and Generals. Ken Burns mentioned such a meeting in his 1990 PBS series on the Civil War. Gods and Generals refers to Cobb’s Brigade as “Brigadier General Thomas R. R. Cobb’s Irish Regiment, Georgia, C.S.A.”
John McNeer discusses the ostensible battle between the two brigades in An American Tragedy at Fredericksburg: Clash of the Irish Brigades.1 John Joe McGinley wrote a comparable article for irishcentral.com.2 There are other similar accounts.3
Conversely, in Civil War Myth Busting: The Fictional Confederate Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg, Ryan Quint contends no Confederate Irish Brigade ever existed and no clash of the Irish Brigades occurred at Fredericksburg.4 Quint points to the description of the Fredericksburg battle in the regimental history of the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry, written by its commander, St. Clair A. Mulholland, as the origin of the myth.5
Quint writes:
“Lieutenant Colonel St. Clair Mulholland, commanding the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry at Fredericksburg, later wrote a regimental history. In his section on Fredericksburg, Mulholland wrote, ‘And now occurred a strange and pathetic incident. . . behind that rude stone breast-work were ‘bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh’—the soldiers of Cobb’s Brigade were Irish like themselves.’
According to Mulholland, the Confederates recognized the Irish Brigade and let out, ‘Oh God, what a pity! Here comes Meagher’s fellows!’ That quote has been repeated ad nauseum in writings regarding Fredericksburg, but it’s important to remember it was Mulholland writing it, not a Confederate.”
But it was not Mulholland who wrote those lines. Mulholland authored The Story of the 116th Regiment: Pennsylvania Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion in 1903.5 Mulholland begins his personal account of the battle on page 38 with “The long hours of the night had slipped away and the morning of December 13th broke chill and cold.” His personal account ends at the bottom of page 55.
Mulholland then mentions “A British line officer, writing on the campaign of Fredericksburg…” and goes on to say, “We quote his account of the attack of the Irish Brigade on December 13th, 1862.” Mulholland states the British officer’s account was published by “Keegan & Co., London” but there are no footnotes or endnotes to track it down further.
The next two and a half pages appear to be an account of this unnamed British officer, writing as though he is embedded with the Confederate forces. We cannot expect a book written over a century ago to obey our current conventions regarding quotation marks and paragraph breaks, which makes interpretation more difficult.
The narrative states that a Confederate commander, a Colonel Miller, “ordered his men to hold their fire for a space.” This is followed by the language about the strange and pathetic incident…bone of their bone…and “the soldiers of Cobb’s Brigade were Irish...” and four lines later comes the language “What a pity! Here comes Meagher’s fellows! was the cry in the Confederate ranks.”
Language follows that strongly suggests the author, the British officer, is writing from a perspective behind the stone wall and not in front of it, as Mulholland would have been: “twelve hundred rifles, plied by cool and unshaken men, concentrated a murderous fire upon the advancing line” and “the Confederate veterans never quailed.”
Finally, near the end of this account, stands a line St. Clair Mulholland could never have written: “the Irish Brigade had ceased to exist.” For the Irish Brigade, though suffering Light Brigade level casualties, had hardly ceased to exist and Meagher remained its commander.
It appears most likely it was this British officer embedded with the Confederate forces and presumably well acquainted with the Cobb’s men who wrote, “bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh—the soldiers of Cobb’s Brigade were Irish like themselves.”
The British observer could not have been the celebrated Lt. Col. Arthur Fremantle of Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards. Fremantle’s travels did not bring him to the Confederacy until four months after the Battle of Fredericksburg.
Immigration from Ireland to America occurred in two principal waves. The first, in the early 1700’s, occurred when the Scots who had settled the Northern Ireland region around Ulster to anchor the land for the English king, becoming the “Scots-Irish,” left because of deteriorating economic conditions and a souring of relations with the English. Individuals in this initial wave of the Irish diaspora settled in the major east-coast population centers but also along the frontier, filtering their way south through Appalachia as far as Georgia. They say you cannot swing a possum in the South without hitting someone of Scots-Irish descent. Many notable Americans are of Scots-Irish heritage, such as Andrew Jackson, Mark Twain, George S. Patton and Neil Armstrong.
The second and much larger wave of the Irish diaspora occurred during the potato famine era, beginning in the mid-1840’s. These immigrants settled primarily in the major east-coast population centers, Pennsylvania and New England. Current maps show a much denser concentration of Irish descendants in the Northeast than in the Southeast. Georgia is one of the states of the old Confederacy with the lowest density of Irish. A map of the “Most Irish States in the US” ranks Pennsylvania #6, New York #19 and Georgia #43. (New Hampshire is #1). A 19th century map would likely show a similar distribution.
When Thomas Meagher recruited the regiments of his Irish Brigade, he drew from a region thick with Irish. Thomas Cobb, not so much.
The ten most common Irish surnames in the 19th century, excluding Smith since it is so prevalent, were Murphy, Kelly, O’Sullivan, Walsh, O’Brien, Byrne, Ryan, O’Connor, O’Neill and O’Reilly. Examining the rosters of two random representative companies for Irish surnames shows that Company B of the 69th New York Infantry, one of the core regiments of the Union’s Irish Brigade, had six of these common names of ninety-eight members, or 6.1%, plus many more readily recognizable Irish surnames.6 In contrast, Company B of the 24th Georgia Infantry had no members with these common surnames and only a few with possibly Irish surnames.7
Some sources mention the 24th Georgia having a green battle flag. Hugh W. Barrow wrote a detailed regimental history of the 24th Georgia.7 The flags shown in Barrow’s account are variations on the Confederate stars and bars and show no trace of green. The 24th Georgia battle flag widely peddled on the internet is apparently a Hollywood concoction.4 It resembles the first flag shown in Barrow’s regimental history but with an added gold Irish harp. There is no evidence this flag existed before Gods and Generals.
It is difficult to dismiss the account of the embedded British officer quoted by Mulholland. One cannot impugn Mulholland, who went on to win the Medal of Honor at Chancellorsville, reached the rank of Brevet Major General and had a distinguished postwar career. So, while there may have been “bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh” Irishmen in the 24th Georgia Infantry, it seems unlikely they made up enough of a proportion to call it an “Irish” unit in the same way the men in the regiments of the Union’s Irish Brigade did, where one truly could not have swung a skunk without hitting an Irishman.
Bibliography
1. McNeer J. An American Tragedy at Fredericksburg: Clash of the Irish Brigades. (http://historyarch.com/2017/12/12/an-american-tragedy-at-fredericksburg-clash-of-the-irish-brigades)
2. McGinley JJ. The clash of the Irish Brigades at the Battle of Fredericksburg. (https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/clash-irish-brigades-battle-of-fredericksburg)
3. Irish Rebels of the Georgia 24th Regiment https://ultimateflags.com/confederate/irish-rebels-georgia-24th-regiment)
4. Quint R. Civil War Myth Busting: The Fictional Confederate Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg. https://emergingcivilwar.com/2021/01/07/civil-war-myth-busting-the-fictional-confederate-irish-brigade-at-fredericksburg/
5. Mulholland SA. The Story of the 116th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion. Fordham University Press, New York, 1996.
6. dmna.ny.gov/historic/reghist/civil/MusterRolls/Infantry/69thInf_NYSV_MusterRoll.pdf
7. Barrow HW. Private James R. Barrow and Company B Cobb’s Legion Infantry. http://cobbslegioninfantry.com/
An Expatriate Education
I remember certain things from about the time I was in the seventh grade. Bits and pieces. I remember my teacher, Ms. Williams, a nice lady with long, dark hair. I remember learning how important coal mining was to the economy of Birmingham, England—a strange, random factoid to stick in an American boy’s brain. I remember watching Fess Parker play Davy Crockett on our black and white TV. And I remember watching Russian tanks rolling down the streets of Budapest.
Three decades later I would meet a woman whose father was caught up in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Sarah was one of our neurology residents at Virginia Commonwealth University and I was an assistant professor. She mentioned her Hungarian heritage from time to time and I knew she had grown up in Virginia but been educated in Hungary. She finished her residency and I eventually left the faculty.
After another thirty years, we became colleagues when I joined her private practice group as my part time retirement job. We renewed acquaintances and I finally learned the whole story—why those Russian tanks were rolling, what had happened to her father, why Sarah had gone to school in Budapest and why Sarah’s father had encouraged her to go to college in Hungary despite his horrendous experiences there.
Prior to WWII, Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and fought as a German ally in WWI. In WWII, it again fought with Germany. After WWII, Hungary technically became a democracy, but Communist influences eventually prevailed and by 1949 a tyrannical Soviet puppet regime had seized power, brutally suppressing any opposition. In 1956, the Hungarians rebelled. Students started the revolution but it quickly spread.
Sarah had told me parts of the story before. I knew she had gone to college and medical school at Semmelweis University in Budapest, that her father had been caught up in the revolution, imprisoned and tortured, but despite this had still encouraged her to go back to Hungary to complete her education. Over lunch one day at an upscale seafood restaurant, we talked again about this fascinating story.
The waiter appeared, offering three kinds of delicious bread, a house specialty, and took our orders. As Sarah decided which slice of bread to try first, I said, “The story about 1956 and what happened to your Dad, and that despite all of that he still wanted you to go to school in Hungary is astonishing. Seems Hungary would be the last place on earth he would want you to go.”
“No,” Sarah said, “It makes perfect sense. There’s a Hungarian word called honfiság. Hungarian and English don’t translate well here because Hungarian meanings are multilayered, but in its simplest translation it means patriotism. But on a deeper level, Hungarians are Hungarian to the core. They really are. This pitiful, little country has been the doormat for everything that has ever happened in Central Europe. Always on the wrong side. The Turks were there for 300 years. It’s a very Hungarian honfiság thing for him to encourage his child to go back.”
“You were born in this country?”
“Yes, in 1958. And getting back to the whole honfiság thing, my father was imprisoned and tortured repeatedly, for love of his country. He didn’t blame Hungary. This was the regime, the circumstances of the time. By the time we became old enough to travel with my sister and my mother, we went home regularly. I say home because that was home to us. Hungary was not just some 23 and Me or Ancestry.com abstraction, this was where the rest of our family still lived. My mother’s parents, my mother’s siblings, everybody else was still back there.”
“So, you have extended family in Hungary?” I asked.
“I have a large extended family who went through all of these experiences. Now my father never went back. He felt positive that if he went back, they would throw him in jail. But this wasn’t because he didn’t love Hungary. Didn’t love this country where he grew up, where his ancestors were from. His family was landed gentry; he would have been targeted anyway. Even had he not been a revolutionary trying to overthrow the government.”
“So, was he involved in the revolution?”
“Oh, yeah,” Sarah said. “That’s why they ultimately fled, because he’d gotten word they had another warrant out for his arrest because of his activities with the revolution.”
“Was he one of the students?”
“No, he was not a student. He was in his late 20’s by then and already working but he was one of the organizers of the student movement. I can’t tell you a lot of specifics, because he would shut down every single time.”
“He never talked about what he went through?”
“He never discussed any details. He found it too painful, even years later. Visiting Hungary once, I went to a place called the Terror House. The bottom level was the interrogation rooms. Floor slanted, drain in the middle. I don’t believe in ju-ju and ghosts and such, but I have to tell you, a feeling came over me when I walked through there. I am positive he was tortured in that room.”
Selecting another slice of bread, she continued, “But, ultimately, he loved his country. This was why he risked the things he did, to do what he could to free it and ensure a better future for everybody.”
“So,” I asked, “How did he talk you into going back there to college? I’m envisioning a headstrong American teenager being told she needs to go to Hungary to college.”
“I wasn’t told,” Sarah said.
“How did you make that decision?”
“It was my idea. It was important for my parents that we maintain our Hungarian identity. We spoke Hungarian at home. We attended a refugee group meeting once a month. My father would stand up and recite from famous Hungarian poets. They would sing and dance. The wives would make Hungarian food. And we went home throughout my childhood. I would go every couple of years and stay all summer long. I had people there I cared a lot about.
“You also have to understand, I went to high school at St. Anne’s, an all girl’s Catholic school. The girls were all the same. They all came from upper middle-class backgrounds; they were all Catholic; they all thought the same things; they all walked the walk; they all talked the talk and I stood out like six sore thumbs. I was not the typical Virginia girl. Most of these people had no idea Hungary was even a country, much less in what part of the globe.”
“l can imagine.”
“Oh, yeah,” Sarah said. “I got used to morning announcements consisting of ‘In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and Sarah go to the office please’. Because I was a bit of a hell raiser. I did not fit that mold. So, it came to: am I going to have this life forced on me?”
“You thought college would just be more of St. Anne’s?”
“Well, pretty much. I played piano and my teacher encouraged me to apply for a music scholarship to Catholic University. So, I did and they offered me a scholarship. And I thought, damn I don’t want to do this. I also applied to the University of Virginia. And damn, UVA accepted me too. And then it’s the whole jeans and pearls thing and they’re talking about the sororities and what they’re gonna rush and everything and I’m feeling viscerally sick. You’ve got to understand, I don’t fit that mold. No. I had enough self-realization. Not a society girl.”
“So, you looked at other places. You didn’t just pick Semmelweis, you considered alternatives.”
“I did,” Sarah said. “I had friends in high school, but their dreams were like everybody else’s dreams. My dreams were so alien I didn’t even share them.”
“What do you mean, your dreams were so alien?”
“What I wanted to do with my life was so alien.”
“You had dreams of a career, something more than domestic life?”
“Yes, exactly. They dreamed so little. They were going to stay in Virginia. They thought I was totally weird that I wasn’t playing sports year-round, being on travel teams. ‘You’re never around in the summer. You’re not on summer swim team.’ Well, that’s because I’m in Europe. I’m thinking, you haven’t even crossed state lines, man. You’ve never read Tolstoy.”
Sarah’s father never would talk about his experiences in 1956. He told his wife early in their marriage that when it was time for him to go, he would tell her about it. Then when he was in hospice, on his deathbed, Sarah’s mother finally brought it up and he looked up and said “Please don’t torture me. Let me go in peace.”
Amazing Grace and the Grand Tetons
I remember looking at the picture of the Grand Tetons on the church fan and trying to go there in my mind as my father’s sermon went on and on and on. The snow-capped peaks looked cool and inviting inside the stultifying sanctuary of one of the many white clapboard Methodist churches far from town down a red dirt Georgia road. After exploring the mountain, I would flip the fan over and read the funeral home ad on the back, again. I had heard all my father’s sermons many times. I spent more time in church growing up than was good for me.
Around age fourteen, some of the proselytizing had sunk in and my fevered adolescent brain became obsessed with the idea of eternity and driven mad by Amazing Grace. I remember lying in bed, trying to go to sleep, not able to stop thinking about eternity, not able to stop thinking about the last verse of Amazing Grace.
When we’ve been there ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun
To me, this meant heaven would be church. All day. Every day. Singing. Bored out of my mind. For ten thousand years. Then another ten thousand years. And on and on. It made me crazy. I decided hell might be preferable because at least it would be more interesting.
They say recovering Catholics have nothing on recovering preacher’s kids.