Blog 3923 – 08.20.2026
Chickamauga Battlefield
As a boy growing up in the East Lake community of Chattanooga, Tennessee I lived with my brother and parents one block east of Rossville Blvd. That location was only a couple of miles from the small town of Rossville, Georgia just across the Georgia state line. On several occasions during our long summer vacations from school, with our parent’s permission my brother and I and two neighborhood friends who were also brothers would ride from our houses together to Chickamauga Battlefield on our bikes. We would walk through the museum and ride all around the park before heading home.
It was one of the biggest adventures of our young lives. It was hard for us to imagine that beautiful well maintained park with all of its gleaming monuments having once be a great battlefield of the Civil War. Our dads had served in World War Two and the TV series Combat and Gallant Men and many WW2 war movies filled the airwaves and our boyish imagination. We played “war” in the nearby woods almost constantly through those long summer vacations away from school. All four of us grew up to serve in the U.S. Army. My brother and I as enlisted soldiers and Ric and Mike as Officers out of the Middle Tennessee State University ROTC program. Mike retired at twenty years as a Colonel and Ric resigned his commission after fewer years at the rank of Captain. I trust my boyhood buddy will correct me if I get any of the details wrong. One enlistment was more than enough for my brother and I.
We had all four taken Junior ROTC at Chattanooga Central High School. Having fathers who served in WW2, spending a lot of time at the Chickamauga Battlefield, the Chattanooga National Cemetery, Point Park atop Lookout Mountain where the Battle Above the Cloud took place, all those TV movies and shows depicting military service and countless hours playing war as boys, and actual Junior ROTC training in high school set us up to become real soldiers for a while.
As boys when we rode our bikes to the Chickamauga Battlefield it had been a hundred years since the battle raged there and almost twenty years since our father’s had served in WW2 and over ten years since the Korean War. U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War at that time was only in a military advisory capacity as typified by a brief NBC TV series call The Lieutenant staring Gary Lockwood.
My Uncle Charles Munson, a career Marine, served three tours in South Vietnam. And I myself served one tour as a teletype repairman in the 509th Radio Research Group which was the Army Security Agency’s code name for its efforts in the war.
Growing up surrounded by so many war memorials and having visited Washington, D.C. and many cities and towns around the country with their own memorials to those who served and died in so many wars, the tragedy of war in my mind far outweighs its glory.
For many years the U.S. Army maintained a training post not far from the entrance to the Chickamauga Battlefield called Fort Oglethorpe. The famous WW2 General George S. Patton was stationed there as a young cavalry officer. In the opening of the great war movie, Patton, George C. Scott portraying Patton gives his famous speech in which he says to his men, “It is not your job to die for your country. It is your job to make some other dumb son of a bitch die for his.” I never saw that carved on any war memorial, but that is what war is really all about. I saw the movie Patton in Vietnam at the NCO Club at Davis Station on Tan Son Nhut Airbase just outside Saigon in 1970. That was the only combat action I actually observed in my eleven month tour in Vietnam. For that good fortune I am extremely grateful. It still horrifies me to think of the over fifty thousand American military personnel and the over two and a half million Vietnamese who lost their lives in that terrible war. A half a million soldiers died in the American Civil War.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
The Cruel War
theencouragingword 