Without a Clue

The Colonel is one Mississippian who is glad that the Union was saved.

He is an American, a citizen of the United States, and proud of it. 

But, more than pride, the Colonel feels an overwhelming sense of gratitude and privilege that he was born in the greatest, most free nation the world has ever seen.

He can make that judgement and feel that way about it because he has seen the rest of the world up close and personal.  We Americans take for granted the freedoms and opportunities about which the vast majority of the rest of humanity can only dream and for which they yearn wistfully.

The Colonel knows in his heart and head that if the Confederacy had won their independence 150 years ago, there today would almost certainly be no American superpower.  The world would be a far different one without the great nation that emerged from the crucible of civil war cleansed and re-united.  The dark ages that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire would have have looked down-right bright and cheery compared to the darkness of a 20th Century without the United States.        

In the early days of his adulthood (and he self-refers as an adult with respect to age alone), the Colonel swore an oath of allegiance and defense to the Constitution of that Union — one to which he is bound until death. He likes to think that he would have remained loyal to that oath had he been a commissioned officer in the US Army in the spring of 1861. 

Had the Colonel been a student at Ole Miss then, he would almost certainly have joined the University Greys and gone to war as a Confederate -- almost every student did.  And, here’s the thing — he wouldn’t have had a clue about what he was really doing. Most young men don’t get a clue until late in their twenties. 

In distant retrospect, historians casually ascribe noble social and political motivations to the boys who go off to war.  The grim, nasty, horrible, stinking battlefield truth is young men don't go to war for some politician's agenda. They join, and remain in, the ranks, not out of any sense of higher purpose -- except for one... 

Each other.  

Their letters from camp are filled with yearning for home and lots of reference to the the nobility of their "cause," to be sure.  The Colonel knows, because he has penned hundreds of letters home, that what a soldier writes home is most often what he believes those at home want to hear.  But, what they don't put in writing is the one thing they find the hardest to put in words -- their love of their comrades in arms.

It is for each other, that young men fight.  Trust the Colonel on this.   

In the early years of the last century, as the American South crawled out from under a heavy blanket of bitterness and defeat to join the new day of American exceptionalism, the one over-riding emotion remained a great sorrow for the boys without a clue who had marched off to the stirring tunes of "Dixie" and the "Bonnie Blue Flag" and disappeared forever.  Southern boys without a clue  fell on battlefields and died in diseased camps far from family and loved ones who waited and watched in vain for their return.  

A southern boy without a clue who died on the battlefields of Shiloh, Antietam, or Gettysburg was often left on the field where he fell as his surviving comrades yielded the field to northern boys without a clue.      

Northern boys fell too, of course.  But, in victory, their remains were far more often buried and marked honorably.

A southern boy's grave was often a mass interment without any identifying markings.

When someone without a clue looks at a war memorial -- from any war -- what they often default to is their bias regarding the righteousness of that war.  But a war memorial is not a celebration of the war or its "causes."  A war memorial immortalizes the names of the mortal boys without a clue who advanced into the blazing guns -- not in response to a politician's speech, but in loving response to his comrade's simple "let's go."  

A vocal minority of the current crop of children -- young men and women without a clue -- matriculating at Ole Miss, stirred up by self-appointed social justice priests masquerading as teachers -- who themselves have not the first clue regarding what it means to serve in the ranks -- are agitating for the removal of the war memorial that stands prominently at the center of the campus.  

These same self-appointed social justice priests masquerading as teachers have been at the forefront of a decades-long insurgent campaign to strip the University of Mississippi of any reference to the history of the school that they deem -- in their infinitely tyrannical socialist, politically correct wisdom -- not progressive. 

Mascots, flags, and songs have fallen to their zeal to rid the world of anything they feel -- emphasis on the unlearned concept of "feeling" -- is offensive.  

Now, they find a memorial to southern boys who died in a war they didn't start offensive.  

They have crossed a line on the other side of which stands one infuriated United States Marine Colonel. 

They claim that the "cause" for which they marched and died was not just, demonstrating in their self-righteous, virtue-signally fervor that they have not the first clue about justice.  

The Colonel denounces them with every fiber of his being.  Were he still prone to the profanity that marked his former lack of self-discipline and resistance to the fruit of the Holy Spirit, the Colonel would easily make this post one that would make Patton's ghost blush.  

The statue on the campus of Ole Miss makes no claim as to any righteousness of the cause for which the Mississippi boys marched to war. It simply memorializes those who died and are mostly buried in unmarked (sometimes mass) graves far from home. 

The statue on the Ole Miss campus was paid for and erected, not by politicians, but by mothers and sisters whose last sight of their boys was their butternut blending into the ranks of their brothers.  Those mothers and sisters had no marked grave to visit.  We today have only this memorial to remind us, not of the cause, but of the effect of war.     

Leave the memorial alone — remember boys without a clue.