'They’ve No Clue of My Reality'

“We are all well and in good spirits, have enough to eat. I have not yet eaten the cake you sent me. I do not have to do guard duty as I am an officer, think of sergeant Peck, sounds pretty big don’t it, eh?” 

That’s Marcus Peck, a soldier from Sand Lake, N.Y., who answered President Lincoln’s call to defend the Union, enlisted in the Army, served for six months and died of disease in a Washington, D.C. military hospital without ever seeing combat. For my newspaper in 1992 I interviewed one of Peck’s descendants, Nancy Brown of Poestenkill, N.Y. In a wooden chest stored in her mother’s closet, Brown found 35 wartime letters between Peck and his family, as well as the young sergeant’s pocket diary. Letters of a Civil War Soldier and His Family was published in 1993 by the Poestenkill Historical Society.

 

Reading history is often an exercise in abstraction. The individual and his experience remain inert on the page. Walt Whitman, who volunteered as a nurse in the military hospitals around Washington, D.C., wrote that “the real war will never get in the books.”

 

Born in 1835, Peck enlisted in September 1862. A month later he was mustered into H Co., New York 169th Infantry. In a letter from New York City, dated September 28 of that year, he writes: “We started from Troy on Thursday about dark, marched from camp to the cars, and were soon flying off for Dixie. One man, a member of Co. A, fell between the cars and was killed before he had got out of sight of home. I did not sleep much that night, the cars made so much noise.”

 

In a letter dated October 26, Peck writes: “I am well and have not been sick at all since I left home, another thing I have not shaved any since I was at home, and as a natural consequence, begin to look quite bear fashion. Hank gets along well cooking but burns his bean soup once in a while we have fresh beef every other day also rice and molasses.”

 

In the same letter he notes a rumor: “I hear that politics is all the rage at the north now. I am sorry to hear this for I think that the war should be attended to first, and then politics.” And this: “I did not sleep as well as I did in my comfortable quarters at Camp Abercrombie the night before but a soldier you know has got to do the best he can. But this must answer for this time as I feel rather tired and sore after lugging my heavy knapsack five or six miles through the mud.”

 

The first hint of Peck’s illness comes on February 17, 1863: “Laid in my tent all day.” The next day: “Woke up in the morning sick. The ground covered with snow. Returned to camp,” and the next: “Had a fever, sick abed.” By Feb. 23, he writes: “Better though very weak,” but on March 3 he notes: “Not yet well. Read a letter from home.” On March 10, Peck wrote his last diary entry: “Snowed in Washington today. Camp rumors that we were to march to the front. A little better today.” On March 12, apparently too weak to write, Peck dictated a final letter to his parents. He tries to sound optimistic but can no longer conceal the severity of his illness:

 

“I have not recovered yet from my sickness nor can I say that I am very sick because I am around all the time. I am a going to the Armory Hospital as there is so much noise in the company quarters that it is enough to make a well man crazy, and our Doctors are not any thing to brag of.”

 

On March 21, 1863, Peck died at age twenty-seven of typhoid fever in Washington, D. C., and was buried at home in Sand Lake Union Cemetery. Historians attribute more than half the 618,000 Union and Confederate deaths in the war not to battlefield wounds but disease: dysentery, pneumonia, malaria, typhus, chicken pox, enteric (typhoid) fever.

 

I remembered Marcus Peck and his letters when Bob Barth, poet and Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, this week sent me a new poem, “Letters from Vietnam”:

 

“I didn’t write them. What was I to say?

I saw a man whose leg was left in shreds

After he tripped a booby-trap today?

Traumatize those who sleep in warm, soft beds

While saying, in their trauma, they’ve no clue

Of my reality, although they think they do?”