"Veteran"
by Acey
Disclaimer: I don't own the Animorphs, nor am I making any money off of this, blah, blah, blah, it's K.A. Applegate's... you should know by now that I don't own much worth owning.
Author's Note: Loony Lovegood, after about a quarter of a million revisions, here is the Animorphs fic you requested (a.k.a. the result of me borrowing almost every book on the shelf on the Civil War, then, after finding all needed information, staring at her computer in agony, wondering why in the heck she chose that topic anyway, and how in the heck she could make a decent, unboring [I'm calling that a word now] story out of it).
The bell rang. History class 101. The teacher's topic, the Civil War.
Also known as the War Between the States, or, for a long time, simply the War, before the two World Wars and the Korean and the Vietnam served their purpose and drowned that name into oblivion, along with hundreds of thousands of militia.
Names on a wall now, carved in stone in Washington, D.C. Cold marble monuments to a dozen conflicts, more erected every year, soldiers on horseback, soldiers standing, soldiers in every position, looking as dead as corpses no matter the detail the artists put into those statues. Dead, and forgotten.
"Turn to page two forty," the teacher says, watching as a couple of kids play football with folded up sheets of loose-leaf paper and tells them to stop before she continues.
"Now, picking up from yesterday, we just finished studying about Gettysburg. Who still remembers any of the details concerning that battle?"
Silence.
"Anyone at all?"
More bored silence. History would repeat itself no matter how the teachers taught the lessons, that much can be deduced easily enough, quickly enough.
Unfortunately enough.
"Well, then," she says, sounding defeated, "it looks like no one bothered paying any attention. Pickett's Charge-- anyone remember Pickett's Charge?"
The answer's obvious; it's on the page. I let someone else answer for me. Sometimes I wonder why I bother even stepping into this history classroom full of posters and timelines and reports, when I lived it all, if you could call me alive, more than any supposed vampire in legend, and cursed even worse than one.
Doomed to see it all and barely be able to do a thing in the universe about what happens. Charmed life, being an android. Charmed.
"Yes, good," says the teacher to whoever answered. "Very good. Now, we're going to skip a few months during this lesson, and turn our thoughts to Sherman's March to the Sea."
She's getting into her element now, which means that at least three people will be asleep by the time class is over.
"Okay, then. You see General Sherman's picture on the next page. Read for me... let's see, Marco."
She did that intentionally. I don't know which class Marco tends to pay the least attention in, history or math.
He quickly turned to the page a full four minutes behind everyone else and started. I'd like to tune him out, but this is a new textbook, and I half want to know how the current edition of Project Rewrite History goes.
"Sherman's main objective was to..."
It's almost the same as the last textbook's interpretation. I wait to see if they remembered, bitter, caustic, to add any of the general's quotes.
"He said he would 'make Georgia howl,' and upon the capture of Savannah, in December, 1864, asked to give it to Lincoln as a Christmas present. Atlanta had fallen before Savannah, and its railroads were torn to make them unfit for use by either army."
No kidding.
Odd how war is so full of if onlys that are talked about afterwards, puzzled over. Any war, take your pick. I could list them for you, in chronological order, even, if you'd like. I could tell you about the fall of the Roman Empire just as easily as the battle of Waterloo. Vietnam? I wasn't a hippie, if that was what you're wondering, not even when it was fashionable. I didn't help with the pyramids to stand around doing nothing but flash the peace sign centuries later. The Chee aren't like that.
I could see where the history lesson was going. To the teacher I would just be Erek King, yet another bored-out-of-his-wits student, watching the clock hands move at their sluggish rate, wishing I was doing anything but being forced to listen to her hour-long lecture.
She'd never realize that what I really was thinking about pertained perfectly to the day's lesson.
**********************************************************************
If all Georgia Septembers were like the one in 1864, I seriously doubt too many people would be living there now. It was hot, muggy, miserable. The only rain the fields got that year was the rain of cannons, and that didn't help King Cotton much. Not like there was much of the fiber being shipped. The blockades were finally doing their job, or so I heard.
I was on the right side of things that go-around, lived in New York before the war. I was one of the doctors, Union Army. I looked too young to really be a doctor, and they would have refused me and tried to put me in as a foot soldier if I hadn't enlisted early on, before they needed quite as many military personnel. But an army does need a large handful of doctors in the wake of battle, more than it has, really, and I suppose they thought I'd do. Sherman's division suffered heavy casualties that summer and early fall (if you could call it that-- like I said, Georgia was a misery that September), and we were constantly on call.
Sad. There wasn't very much the doctors could do to a point. They've said in the history books how even though there were drugs avaliable back then, there weren't many people that were trained to give them. At any rate, medicine was light-years behind the way it is nowadays here-- if you were shot in the right place, chances were you'd become an amputee, provided the bullet wasn't to your head.
"Doc?"
"Sir?" I said, pouring some water over what passed for medical instruments.
I knew that man by looks only. He was a first lieutenant, and he had a brutally thin mustache that was probably meant to divert attention from the fact that he had a receding hairline.
"Didn't know if you knew, but Atlanta fell today."
I nodded like I had never heard the news. He wasn't the first to tell me so; most of the friends of the wounded had announced it as they took their comrades over to the operation table, like I didn't have eyes to see the fact that we were penetrating the Southern lines.
"That's good."
"Sure is, Doc, sure is. We'll lick 'em yet! Took us awhile, but no traitors like them Rebs stand a chance against the United States! Now that we've got the railroad--"
I barely listened to him as I finished cleaning a scalpel. A nod of the head here and there, however, seemed to suffice for the lieutenant.
"Yes sir, we've got them in a corner. Atlanta's a big town. Get their supplies from there, the Rebels, things like that. Would you believe that they didn't even bother to get people outta that town until yesterday? Makes you wonder.There's still--"
I wondered if he had come to the tent for any reason other than to boast about the campaign's success like it had been his single-handedly.
"Oh, oh, yeah, well, just wanted to let you know we're gonna stay here for the winter, part of it, anyway. One of the captains told me. Soon's they evacuate the town, of course."
"I thought you said that they evacuated--"
"Naw, there's still some left. Not too many, though, but there you have it, Doc. See you tommorow, then."
"Don't get shot and I won't," I said dryly, watching him depart, and he chuckled good-naturedly under his breath. Years of war had not damaged his sense of humor. "Goodbye, Lieutenant."
**********************************************************************
Acey: Don't think I'm done yet. Unless I slap a big "finis" at the end of a chapter, I am far from done.
Acey: Special thanks goes to Loony Lovegood for getting me to stray from my usual DBZ fics and into this one. I had a lot of fun writing this (not so much fun researching it out-- and if I messed up anywhere, please tell me), and I hope, as always, that you enjoyed reading this.
Disclaimer: I don't own the Animorphs, nor am I making any money off of this, blah, blah, blah, it's K.A. Applegate's... you should know by now that I don't own much worth owning.
Author's Note: Loony Lovegood, after about a quarter of a million revisions, here is the Animorphs fic you requested (a.k.a. the result of me borrowing almost every book on the shelf on the Civil War, then, after finding all needed information, staring at her computer in agony, wondering why in the heck she chose that topic anyway, and how in the heck she could make a decent, unboring [I'm calling that a word now] story out of it).
The bell rang. History class 101. The teacher's topic, the Civil War.
Also known as the War Between the States, or, for a long time, simply the War, before the two World Wars and the Korean and the Vietnam served their purpose and drowned that name into oblivion, along with hundreds of thousands of militia.
Names on a wall now, carved in stone in Washington, D.C. Cold marble monuments to a dozen conflicts, more erected every year, soldiers on horseback, soldiers standing, soldiers in every position, looking as dead as corpses no matter the detail the artists put into those statues. Dead, and forgotten.
"Turn to page two forty," the teacher says, watching as a couple of kids play football with folded up sheets of loose-leaf paper and tells them to stop before she continues.
"Now, picking up from yesterday, we just finished studying about Gettysburg. Who still remembers any of the details concerning that battle?"
Silence.
"Anyone at all?"
More bored silence. History would repeat itself no matter how the teachers taught the lessons, that much can be deduced easily enough, quickly enough.
Unfortunately enough.
"Well, then," she says, sounding defeated, "it looks like no one bothered paying any attention. Pickett's Charge-- anyone remember Pickett's Charge?"
The answer's obvious; it's on the page. I let someone else answer for me. Sometimes I wonder why I bother even stepping into this history classroom full of posters and timelines and reports, when I lived it all, if you could call me alive, more than any supposed vampire in legend, and cursed even worse than one.
Doomed to see it all and barely be able to do a thing in the universe about what happens. Charmed life, being an android. Charmed.
"Yes, good," says the teacher to whoever answered. "Very good. Now, we're going to skip a few months during this lesson, and turn our thoughts to Sherman's March to the Sea."
She's getting into her element now, which means that at least three people will be asleep by the time class is over.
"Okay, then. You see General Sherman's picture on the next page. Read for me... let's see, Marco."
She did that intentionally. I don't know which class Marco tends to pay the least attention in, history or math.
He quickly turned to the page a full four minutes behind everyone else and started. I'd like to tune him out, but this is a new textbook, and I half want to know how the current edition of Project Rewrite History goes.
"Sherman's main objective was to..."
It's almost the same as the last textbook's interpretation. I wait to see if they remembered, bitter, caustic, to add any of the general's quotes.
"He said he would 'make Georgia howl,' and upon the capture of Savannah, in December, 1864, asked to give it to Lincoln as a Christmas present. Atlanta had fallen before Savannah, and its railroads were torn to make them unfit for use by either army."
No kidding.
Odd how war is so full of if onlys that are talked about afterwards, puzzled over. Any war, take your pick. I could list them for you, in chronological order, even, if you'd like. I could tell you about the fall of the Roman Empire just as easily as the battle of Waterloo. Vietnam? I wasn't a hippie, if that was what you're wondering, not even when it was fashionable. I didn't help with the pyramids to stand around doing nothing but flash the peace sign centuries later. The Chee aren't like that.
I could see where the history lesson was going. To the teacher I would just be Erek King, yet another bored-out-of-his-wits student, watching the clock hands move at their sluggish rate, wishing I was doing anything but being forced to listen to her hour-long lecture.
She'd never realize that what I really was thinking about pertained perfectly to the day's lesson.
**********************************************************************
If all Georgia Septembers were like the one in 1864, I seriously doubt too many people would be living there now. It was hot, muggy, miserable. The only rain the fields got that year was the rain of cannons, and that didn't help King Cotton much. Not like there was much of the fiber being shipped. The blockades were finally doing their job, or so I heard.
I was on the right side of things that go-around, lived in New York before the war. I was one of the doctors, Union Army. I looked too young to really be a doctor, and they would have refused me and tried to put me in as a foot soldier if I hadn't enlisted early on, before they needed quite as many military personnel. But an army does need a large handful of doctors in the wake of battle, more than it has, really, and I suppose they thought I'd do. Sherman's division suffered heavy casualties that summer and early fall (if you could call it that-- like I said, Georgia was a misery that September), and we were constantly on call.
Sad. There wasn't very much the doctors could do to a point. They've said in the history books how even though there were drugs avaliable back then, there weren't many people that were trained to give them. At any rate, medicine was light-years behind the way it is nowadays here-- if you were shot in the right place, chances were you'd become an amputee, provided the bullet wasn't to your head.
"Doc?"
"Sir?" I said, pouring some water over what passed for medical instruments.
I knew that man by looks only. He was a first lieutenant, and he had a brutally thin mustache that was probably meant to divert attention from the fact that he had a receding hairline.
"Didn't know if you knew, but Atlanta fell today."
I nodded like I had never heard the news. He wasn't the first to tell me so; most of the friends of the wounded had announced it as they took their comrades over to the operation table, like I didn't have eyes to see the fact that we were penetrating the Southern lines.
"That's good."
"Sure is, Doc, sure is. We'll lick 'em yet! Took us awhile, but no traitors like them Rebs stand a chance against the United States! Now that we've got the railroad--"
I barely listened to him as I finished cleaning a scalpel. A nod of the head here and there, however, seemed to suffice for the lieutenant.
"Yes sir, we've got them in a corner. Atlanta's a big town. Get their supplies from there, the Rebels, things like that. Would you believe that they didn't even bother to get people outta that town until yesterday? Makes you wonder.There's still--"
I wondered if he had come to the tent for any reason other than to boast about the campaign's success like it had been his single-handedly.
"Oh, oh, yeah, well, just wanted to let you know we're gonna stay here for the winter, part of it, anyway. One of the captains told me. Soon's they evacuate the town, of course."
"I thought you said that they evacuated--"
"Naw, there's still some left. Not too many, though, but there you have it, Doc. See you tommorow, then."
"Don't get shot and I won't," I said dryly, watching him depart, and he chuckled good-naturedly under his breath. Years of war had not damaged his sense of humor. "Goodbye, Lieutenant."
**********************************************************************
Acey: Don't think I'm done yet. Unless I slap a big "finis" at the end of a chapter, I am far from done.
Acey: Special thanks goes to Loony Lovegood for getting me to stray from my usual DBZ fics and into this one. I had a lot of fun writing this (not so much fun researching it out-- and if I messed up anywhere, please tell me), and I hope, as always, that you enjoyed reading this.