The Nov. 28, 2008, Tulsa World published my Readers Forum piece, "Antietam," in which I reported on a visit my then-8-year-old grandson, Stevie, and I made to Antietam battlefield in rural Maryland.
Well-known Civil War historian and author Dennis Frye led our tour over this ground, which remains hallowed - the bloodiest single day in American history.
More than 23,000 American boys, both Union and Confederate, were killed or wounded there on Sept. 17, 1862.
While Dennis led us on our walk through "The Cornfield," evermore to be remembered for the huge number of casualties suffered by the Union troops, Stevie picked up a rock tinged with red and asked Dennis if the red was a bloodstain.
Dennis explained the red resulted from iron pyrite but suggested this rock could be a symbol of the bloodiest day in American history.
Stevie still has this rock.
On June 8, 2012, I immediately recalled "Antietam" when I read a news piece on Yahoo titled "Fragments of D-Day Battle Found on Omaha Beach Sand" by Wynne Parry.
Parry wrote that analysis of granules of sand collected from Omaha Beach included "bits of iron with red and orange rust (iron oxide) surviving on - the grains of sand. These were most likely the remains of shrapnel, metal thrown out by explosions " from German artillery.
Parry interviewed two geologists, Earle McBride and Dane Picard, who wrote a paper about this finding, published in the September 2011 issue of the scientific journal The Sedimentary Record. The geologists said these iron oxide fragments won't survive forever " because salt water is highly corrosive to iron," and the waves continually remove the oxide coating and wash them away.
An Internet search does not confirm whether the iron pyrite Stevie found at Antietam might have resulted from red-hot Civil War shrapnel or Minie balls, similar to the iron oxide fragments found at Omaha beach. No matter.
The possibility is intriguing and serves to sharpen our awareness that this microscopic residue of past horrors and suffering by American soldiers still exists.
And what of the shattered lives of the loved ones who learned of the death or maiming, both physical and psychological, of their sons, who were once their little boys?
These surviving loved ones carried their anguish with them until they, themselves, disappeared.
Like the ebb and flow of the ocean's waves that continually remove the iron oxide coating from the grains of sand on Omaha Beach, the flow of time erodes our memory of the passions, determination and devotion to duty that inspired young American warriors to make that charge through The Cornfield and also to run up Omaha Beach.
One-hundred years from now, scientists might find in the sands of Iraq and the crags of Afghanistan similar physical evidence to remind our descendants of the death and destruction American men are now enduring in these far-away places.
The brutal facts and human costs of war haven't changed.
Harvey Blumenthal is a retired physician living in Tulsa. Tuesday is the 151st anniversary of the Battle of Antietam.
Original Print Headline: Battlefields: Time erodes signs of loss
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