What Antietam bloodbath teaches us about war today

SHARPSBURG, MD. -- As a boy, Derek Crist roamed Antietam National Battlefield on the outskirts of town, its rolling hills and gentle streams a child's dream playground.

In 2010, Army Sgt. Crist returned home from two tours in Afghanistan, where nearly 2,000 American servicemembers have died. His platoon lost two soldiers. He says he had not thought deeply about the history of his hometown until he saw fellow soldiers killed and wounded. The ground where, 150 years ago Monday, more than 23,000 were killed, wounded or went missing in the bloodiest day of combat in American history is indescribably more personal.

"The loss of one friend is pretty rough," says Crist, 25, who is out of the Army and pursuing a business degree. "And then you realize you had all that going on right here."

Antietam is a gash in history that is still healing. But it also has become a place of learning, and not just for young military officers studying tactics. As the residents of Sharpsburg and surrounding communities learned long ago -- and as many Americans know from Afghanistan and Iraq -- war's aftershocks echo long after the last shots are fired.

Besides stopping Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the North and giving Abraham Lincoln the ability to issue the Emancipation Proclamation after a battlefield success, Antietam was the site of major advances in battlefield medicine that are being studied and used in Afghanistan.

As the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan move into history, an aftermath commences -- in the memories of the fallen and in the challenges of the injured and their families.

Gettysburg will be remembered on its sesquicentennial next year as the turning point in the Civil War. By comparison, Antietam is tucked away in the history books. But arguably its legacy is as powerful, its aftermath equally poignant. On this 150th anniversary, stories are retold about families hiding in neighbors' basements; of recovering and dying soldiers nursed in homes or churches for weeks; of diaries describing the smell and sounds of armies hurrying toward battle and limping away afterward.

Even in a war marked by seemingly endless casualty lists, the 12 hours around Sharpsburg and Antietam Creek stand alone. Tactical blunders, miscommunication, geography and individual heroism conspired to create a tableau of up-close killing so horrific that for decades thereafter, legions of veterans returned to sort through what they had survived.

Sharpsburg's annual Memorial Day parade dates to 1867, when North and South veterans began returning. Last year, Crist and other Iraq and Afghanistan vets had a place of honor.

The parade draws people from afar, swells the town and is populated by waving soldiers. That is precisely what happened to Sharpsburg on Sept. 17, 1862.

Modern battlefield medicine

Antietam has become more than just the memory of a single day. Techniques first applied here by Jonathan Letterman, the Union Army's medical director, were the basis of modern battlefield medicine and a blueprint for today's civilian emergency response system.

At Antietam, Letterman first tried a coordinated, progressive system of trained first responders, triage stations, surgical field units and permanent hospitals. For civilians today, that's ambulances with EMTs, emergency rooms, operating rooms and hospital room convalescence.

"Every time you see an ambulance run down the road as a result of a 911 call, that is the Battle of Antietam going down the road in front of you," says George Wunderlich, executive director of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in nearby Frederick, Md.

Since 2004, Wunderlich's non-profit Letterman Institute has had classes at Antietam for roughly 5,000 doctors, nurses, medics and other U.S. military medical personnel.

They walk the 24-acre Cornfield, which changed hands six times and left dead and wounded in heaps. They stop for lectures at Bloody Lane, where 5,600 were mowed down in three hours along an 800-yard road. They can walk in seconds across Burnside Bridge, a narrow stone arch over Antietam Creek that 150 years ago cost blue-clad Yankees three hours and 500 casualties to cross.

Wunderlich says that at each stop, "we lay out how many wounded are in this part of the battlefield. We make them think in terms of how you would do this job today."

He says physicians have studied bones from wounded Civil War soldiers because roadside bomb injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan are similar to those from cannon fire at Antietam.

Lt. Col. Justin Woodson, an emergency physician for the Uniformed Services University's Military and Emergency Medicine Department, lectures on an annual trip to Antietam for all first-year military medical students. Woodson, who served in Iraq, traces medical decisions from the point of injury to stretcher, ambulance, field hospitals and more permanent facilities as far away as Frederick, 22 miles from the battlefield.

"We do the same thing on a modern battlefield," Woodson says.

War 'was not a lark'

In history's broad brush, Antietam was a military draw but a strategic Northern victory. Shortly thereafter, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery.

The battle moved the Civil War "beyond reunion (of the states) to freeing 4 million people," says Susan Trail, superintendent of Antietam National Battlefield. "It was just a horrific battle. People by this time in the war were starting to realize this was not a lark."

Despite its proximity to history, Sharpsburg has resisted commercialization. The population is smaller today than in 1862. Developers have been shooed away for 150 years. Some buildings at the time of the battle are immaculately kept and commemorated with plaques. Others are abandoned or falling down.

"We like it to be just a small, quiet town," says Mayor Hal Spielman, who is descended from the family of Joseph Poffenberger, whose farm was a vital staging area and hospital for Union troops. It's also near where Red Cross founder Clara Barton became famous for treating the wounded.

A 2-foot-wide cannonball crevice remains in a prominent Main Street home. Poffenbergers today attend the Christ Reformed Church on Main Street, which still has blood marks on the floor and two stained-glass windows dedicated to the wounded boys of Connecticut regiments hospitalized there.

Wunderlich says some around Sharpsburg and neighboring towns still know where their families hid during the battle or which units camped on their property.

"They can tell you everything about the battle as if it happened to them," he says.

Inexplicable carnage

Bill Poffenberger, 78, says he's never understood why the Yankees never forded the Antietam Creek that he would easily wade across as a boy. He will never know, he says, what was "in a man" that could make him run into certain death or wounding at Burnside's Bridge or how the men on the other side could keep killing.

"Those were 23,000 brothers out there," Poffenberger says of the fallen.

Bob Kozak first came here from Ohio with his father in 1967. Kozak says his dad, who fought in the Pacific in World War II, stopped at Bloody Lane and said, "This was no battle. This was murder."

Kozak, who lives in Frederick, commemorates the sesquicentennial by re-creating Alexander Gardner's controversial photographic exhibit, "The Dead Of Antietam."

The black-and-whites of dead men and horses and shattered equipment sprawled across the fields was shown in New York City three weeks after the battle. Kozak says his re-creation "brings the story forward, to our doorsteps."

Shocking for a public that had never seen battlefield deaths before, Gardner's exhibit spurred debate over war censorship that echoes today, from what embedded journalists should show of combat to whether returning coffins from Iraq and Afghanistan should be photographed.

The exhibit will open Oct. 5 at the battlefield's Pry House, itself symbolic of Antietam's ripples. The Pry farm was Union Gen. George McClellan's headquarters during the battle. The house and barn were hospitals for 400 soldiers and officers. The Pry family never recovered full damages and eventually moved to Tennessee.

Days after the battle, Lincoln visited the wounded Gen. Israel Richardson at the Pry home. Richardson lingered upstairs for six weeks before dying, cared for by his wife and sister who had traveled from Michigan. They took him home for burial. They were among scores of family members who came looking for loved ones, including the father of eventual Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was critically wounded .

Each December, volunteers scatter 23,000 burning candles across the battlefield. Trail says the volume is overwhelming, even more when she thinks of those affected by each loss. She draws parallels to today, to "soldiers being away from home, people being wounded and having to adjust their lives."

"These people 150 years ago weren't any different," Trail says. "They had the same needs, the same family lives, dreams and aspirations. And so it is important for us to not just have statistics and numbers in a book."

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