July 8 - A Hill Nobody Even Sees

Some things are simply forgotten.

There is a plaque at the top of a hill in the middle of Texas that commemorates a Civil War battle that nobody remembers. The city is unimportant, as is the hill. The Union won, which is a relief; but it’s so relatively unremarkable that the exact date of the battle isn’t even properly recorded. Some historians debate it, fruitlessly.

Here, on this very spot two hundred years ago, a man bled to death. A bullet pierced his lung, ripping a hole in his chest. He lay, collapsing, decaying, falling apart, his life draining into the earth around him. His family, his brothers-in-arms, grieved him. They did not know that here, precisely, is where he died.

In some sense, the plaque commemorates him. It commemorates all those like him, those same brothers-in-arms who fell where he fell. Forgotten, sure, but still somehow remembered.

What, then, of the men who fell the town over? They have no plaque, they have no textbooks, they have no academic debate. And yet they bled all the same.