A YANKEE BOY

I worked for many years for a newspaper in Buenos Aires that was majority-owned by a media company based in Charleston, South Carolina. When I was about seven years into my career there—and nearly eight years into my life as an American expatriate—I had pretty much decided that, at some point sooner than later, I wanted to move back to my native United States. By this time, I was general news editor of the paper, but I had never been to the headquarters office in Charleston. While on vacation with my wife and brother-in-law, I decided that as long as we were going on a road-trip, it might as well include Charleston and a visit to headquarters. Maybe I could make the necessary contacts there to provide me with a ticket back to life in the USA.

I had gotten my first taste of the South (as a society, not a region) in 1970, when I was in the Army before moving to South America. I’d done Basic Training at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, which was, I discovered somewhat to my surprise, named after a Confederate general, Braxton Bragg, who had led his rebel army in numerous major battles against the United States, in an effort to overthrow the American republic and create a new, opposing nation the basic tenet of which was to be the preservation of a long-standing tradition of slavery as a mainstay of the Confederacy’s agrarian economy. Why, I wondered, would a major US Army base be named after a leading proponent of insurrection and rebellion against the United States? Why not, I wondered, just name a base after America’s most famous traitor, Benedict Arnold? Worse still, Bragg was one of some sixty West Point-graduate general officers who used all of the experience they had gained in the Army of the United States to become the enemy of that Union and to defend the enslavement of the ancestors of a race of people who made up an important segment of the US population, and, indeed, of the Army?

Despite being taught in school that there were other factors beyond slavery between the industrialized North and agricultural South, it was clear to me that the principal reason for the Civil War had been the issue of the federal government seeking to dictate the abolition of slavery to the Southern states. But I thought that this was a long settled affair. That it had ended with the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, in 1865. Crass error on my part.

I was made painfully aware of this error on my first day in uniform. Standing in formation in our brand new fatigues and painfully stiff new combat boots, we were each asked by a drill sergeant to tell where we were from. It was the typical humiliation exercise—part of the unwritten rulebook for drill instructors—of proudly pronouncing the name of your home state, which you were already missing, only to have the DI howl, “O-hi-o! Oh...hi...oh! Only queers and steers come from Ohio, maggot! Which one are you?”

I noticed as the question made its way down the line that the only northerners in my platoon were myself, a scared-stiff Jewish boy from the Bronx and an older guy from Maine whose number had come up in the draft lottery right after his student deferment for college had run out. Everyone else, to a man, be they black or white, was from the South.

I had already been getting static from one of the DIs since we were lined up at the Reception Center and counted off into platoons, while still dressed in the civvies we’d come from home wearing. I always tended to dress more formally than my contemporaries and that, combined with my then-willowy frame and horn-rimmed spectacles, caught the guy’s attention.

Standing almost nose to nose with me, the broad stiff brim of his felt campaign hat almost touching my forehead, he asked, “You a professor, maggot?”
“No.”
“No, what, shithead?”

“No, sir!”

“Sir? Sir!? I ain’t no goddamn sir! I work for a goddamn living! You will address me as Drill Sergeant. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

“I can’t hear you, maggot. Sound off like you got a pair!”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

“I still can’t hear you!”

“YES, DRILL SERGEANT!”

“And are you a professor...a bookworm...a faggot intellectual?”

“NO DRILL SERGEANT!”

“Well, you sure as hell look like one, and I promise you, trainee, I am going to bring smoke on your young ass!”

It was divide and conquer. They picked out someone to humiliate in front of the rest so as to keep the pack in line. Nobody wanted to be the brunt of that kind of withering exchange, so if the DI could reduce just a handful of men to trembling masses of jelly, he’d have the others’ attention.

But when you were one of the victims, that’s what you were seen as in the eyes of your peers and you had to overcome that imposed identification right away or have it stick throughout training. These were prison-type rules, since we were all captives here and the DIs were our jailers. And that wasn’t always a metaphor. The fact is that several new recruits had come to the reception center in the company of the military police. These were guys, I found out, who’d been given a choice by the judge of going to jail or joining the Army. They had apparently come directly from a holding cell to patriotic duty.

So after asking what state we were from that first day in actual uniform, they asked, “How many of you maggots are Regular Army?” meaning how many of us had joined rather than being drafted. Oddly enough, I was one of the few in my platoon to raise his hand.  

“You, maggot?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

“Really?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

“Well, well, so the professor is Re-gu-lar Army! I am surprised all to hell!”

I was thinking, “Vindication. I’m in.”

“So how long you in for, O-hi-o?”

“Three years, Drill Sergeant!”

“Three years?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!

“Three...fucking...years?”

 “Yes Drill Sergeant!”

“Well, I think it’s a pretty miserable fucking excuse for a human being that only has three goddamn years to give to his country. Get the hell down and knock out twenty-five, you maggot.”

When we were dismissed to go to our barracks and get our things squared away before chow and the next formation, we were issued a dire warning. Our particular platoon DI, who was five-feet-ten, a solid if lead-bellied two-hundred-twenty pounds and African American, said, “One other thing, maggots. In my Army there’s only one color—green. If anybody wants to dispute that, you’ll do it with me.”

Then the sergeant turned on his heel and headed back to the cadre shack and we trainees were left briefly unattended. As we broke ranks and walked to the door of the barracks, I felt somebody tap me on the shoulder. I turned to see a tall, rangy drink of water with a crooked sardonic grin, who, had it not been for the fatigues and the attitude, could have passed for a banjo-player from the Grand Ole Opry. He was one of the other few who confessed to being Regular Army. I was also pretty sure I remembered him as being one of the ones who had arrived accompanied by the MPs.

“Hey,” I said with a friendly smile.

“Hey yourself, you Yankee, blue-balled, sumbitch,” he snarled as he landed a left hook on me that I never saw coming.

I went down, dazed, in the red dirt of the company street. Some of the other guys gathered around to see how this would play out, while others wandered off to the barracks not wanting to get involved. Nobody sought to restrain my attacker. I sat up slowly, desperately trying to shake clear my head and saw the guy standing over me, legs spread, fists cocked. I thought, “If I get up and ‘box’ with this guy, I’ll lose big-time. He won’t even let me get on my feet before he hits me again. So as I dragged myself to my knees, I shot my fist out and up, and the blow was right on target, catching him flush in his unprotected groin. He went down and I was up, shining my brand new boots on him to make sure he wouldn’t feel like jumping right up and hitting me again.

It worked, and discouraged any of my other reluctant comrades from bothering me. But it was clear to me from that point on that if the only “race” in the Army was green, there were still minds in which blue and grey vividly existed. And it wasn’t the last time I would hear insults about “goddamn Yankees” and the honor of the Confederacy.  

Granby Street in Norfolk as I knew in in 1970

I had a much better Southern experience during the seven months that I spent in Virginia on my next assignment at the Army Element of the Navy School of Music. I had a chance to occasionally rub elbows with the traditionally urbane and genteel higher society of that early-American state. An Army buddy of mine—who was from New York, had a doctorate in liturgical music, and had no business being in the Army despite which he was drafted—had a Navy officer friend who asked him to direct his church’s choir in Virginia Beach.

My friend had me singing tenor on Sundays because he had an over-abundance of baritones and basses in the group. So we got to know people who knew people. And then too, this buddy, who was older than I was by six years, was a guy with refined tastes and he took me along on his tours of the local cultural sites in Norfolk and the surrounding area, which was where we worked and studied. He even ended up living off-base in a little century-old bungalow behind the “big house” on what had once been one of Virginia’s traditional antebellum plantations.

But even in that refined atmosphere there was a barely disguised distrust of Yankees and a feeling that, until they got to know us, they should assume that we were slippery, judgmental and up to no good, sticking our Yankee noses in where they didn’t have any business being.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, years later, when, on my first visit to Charleston, I was received by none other than the president and majority owner of the publishing company. He even came in his own car to pick up my wife, my brother-in-law and me at our hotel to show us around the flag-carrier paper (the company owned a total of seven dailies, as well as other news media).

Charleston, South Carolina

I knew enough about him to know that he was a liberal-minded intellectual with a deep respect for democracy, and human and civil rights. He was also a former Navy officer—like several of the top editors in the organization, including a retired rear-admiral. (So much so that the editorial offices upstairs were known as “battleship row”). I was introduced to all of them and we all promised to talk more the next day.

The publisher had traveled widely and bought the controlling interest in our paper in Argentina (his only foreign property) because it was unique—the only English-language daily in the country and one of only a handful in Latin America—and because it had long been a staunch and fearless defender of the ideals that he cherished. He spoke a little Spanish and was quick to bring my brother-in-law, who spoke no English, into the conversation.

That evening, he and his then-fiancée-later-wife showed us the sights in Charleston and then took us to their favorite Greek restaurant for dinner. He told us a great deal about the history of Charleston, its refined cultural traditions, and his family’s long parallel history in the area. He was clearly proud of that history and of his city. But his nostalgia was for the urbane and highly cultured past and present of Charleston society, not, clearly, for the Civil War or for the area’s less savory past in years leading up to the Civil Rights Era.

The following day, my wife and brother-in-law went off sight-seeing, and I met up with a group of editors and columnists from the organization.

“We thought it would be nice to all go to lunch together so we have a chance to chat,” one of the editors said.

“Great,” I said.

“I thought we could go to my club.”

“Sure.”

He introduced me to the others presenting me as, “This is Dan Newland, the Yankee boy that runs our editorial department down in Argentina.”

The Yankee boy? So what was he, the Johnny Reb that ran the editorial department in Charleston? I bit my tongue but thought, “Okay, here we go.”

“So where did the boss take you to supper last night?”

“A nice little Greek...”

“Oh lord! Not that god-awful place. He’s always taking people there. It’s embarrassing. I don’t see what he sees in it.”

“I thought it was lovely.”

“You’re just being polite. Did he make you drink that rot-gut retsina as well?”

“I quite liked it.”

“You’re way too kind. Today I’ll take you to a real Charleston institution.”

It was all very pleasant but there was an undercurrent that made me squirm a little. There was a lot of joshing about my being a Yankee, fond mentions of the antebellum glory of the city, with a barely perceptible hint that it was people like mine, Ohio Yankees, who had destroyed all that. The other editors and columnists seemed less than comfortable as well and kept trying to talk shop with me. The host editor’s message seemed to be, you’re not just foreign because you live in Argentina, but also because you’re a Yankee.

Before we left for lunch at his club, he presented me with Lord Ashley Cooper’s Dictionary of Charlestonese, a lovely tongue-in-cheek study of Charlestonian pronunciations written by Frank Gilbreth, one of the columnists (a.k.a. Ashley Cooper) accompanying us to lunch. Frank was also the best-selling author of Cheaper By The Dozen. We hit it off from the outset. The editor seemed to forget that Frank, although a transplanted Charlestonian for the past thirty-two years, was a Yankee from New Jersey and educated at the University of Michigan.

“Frank here has been kind enough to write this guide for Yankees like yourself who are always at a loss to understand us,” our host said with a wry chuckle.

The club was posh and steeped in tradition. It was in the harbor district, and looked onto Fort Sumter. He made sure we were seated at a table where I would have a clear view of this iconic Civil War relic of the Confederacy.

“You a Civil War buff, Dan? Lots of Yankees who come down here are.”

“Not really,” I said. “Most of my knowledge of it stems from the Civil Rights Era.”

He said, "The Stars and Bars still flies above
the Statehouse here."

“Well, that right out there is Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began.”

“Yes,” I said, “that part I remember from history class. Quite a view.”

“It’s practically a shrine here. You know, the Stars and Bars still flies above the Statehouse here.”

We ordered drinks. Bourbon for him, scotch for me.

“Not a bourbon-drinker?”

“Nope, never acquired a taste for it. My brother is though.”

“Well, if you ever move to the South, you’ll want to learn to like it.”

I wasn’t paranoid or crazy. There was definitely a “you and us” thing going on here even if I refused to participate.

While we all talked shop, waiting for our steaks and seafood, we ordered another drink. As the host editor was finishing his second bourbon, he tried again to bait me and this time it worked.

“Know what it means to renege, Dan?”

What is this, I wondered, a vocabulary test in case I ever work here? But, okay, I was game. If nothing else, to see where he was going with this.

I had a pop of my scotch and said, “Sure. To welch on a commitment.”

“No,” he said with a wry grin, and then carefully pronouncing it so I would get the joke, he said “Re-NEGE is what they do when the change shifts down at the carwash.” And then he laughed raucously at his own joke.

If he had been testing me to see how far he could push me with this Confederate thing before he finally got under my skin, he had finally reached the limit. This was where appeasement ended. He chuckled. The others fell silent. I gave him a hard look, and then looked down at the ice in my scotch. Quickly one of the other editors recovered and said brightly, “So Dan, tell us how you ended up in Buenos Aires,” and that was the end of the renewed Blue and Grey hostilities.

I’ve been thinking about all of this in the context of a piece of news that I saw this week about the failure of the Ohio State Legislature to approve a bill aimed at prohibiting the sale of Confederate memorabilia at this year’s Ohio State Fair. Clearly, this is part of a broader debate going on right now and sparking nationwide protests. But it got me analyzing what it was that had consistently bothered me about what I’ve always considered a futile and divisive attempt by some white Southerners and some white Northerners to rekindle discussions regarding a cruel and needless Civil War prosecuted and settled a century and a half ago at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

Part of what bothers me about it is that I am indeed an Ohio Yankee. That doesn’t mean I hold any animosity toward the South. On the contrary, I’ve spent a lot of time in the South over the years and have met a lot of wonderful Southerners—whom I know only as fellow humans and fellow Americans. I simply grew up feeling repugnance and shame regarding the well-deserved reputation of my country, as a whole, as one of the staunchest and most long-standing defenders of slavery anywhere on earth.

As such, I was always proud that my state had been a major first stop on the so-called Underground Railway, the network of abolitionists who aided and abetted fleeing African Americans in their bid to escape from slavery in the South and to find a new life as free men and women in the North. Ohio was a sanctuary state, a haven for members of an entire race of people held in bondage for more than two and a half centuries, simply because of the color of their skin.

I was proud too that Ohio had provided not only hundreds of thousands of

Ohio general and future  president U.S. Grant

troops but also many of the most prominent generals who fought in that bloody half-decade conflict to not only save the republic but also to root out the scourge of slavery and, once and for all, fully implement the country’s founding principles of individual rights, equality and freedom for all—a struggle that, unfortunately, as witnessed by current nationwide protests, continues today. Indeed, the leader of the Union Army, Ulysses S. Grant, was from Ohio, as were nearly a score of major generals including such historic names as Sherman, Sheridan, Custer, Garfield, McPherson and McCook. The state also furnished over fifty of the Union’s brigadier generals.

Ohio’s immigrant German farming communities, like the one that I hail from, were also well represented in the anti-slavery effort, not the least of which was the Ohio Ninth Infantry that originated in my native Auglaize County under then-Colonel (later Brigadier General) August Willich of St. Marys, a little town about the size of my own and ten miles west.  Willich was a former Prussian Army officer, who brought his knowledge of war with him and made good use of it in that bloodiest of American tragedies.

Ohio immigrant August Willich of St. Marys

There were so many fellow German-Ohioans under his command that his infantry was nicknamed “Die Neuner”. He led those Ohio immigrants in major battles including Shiloh, Stones River, Liberty Gap, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Peachtree Creek and Resaca. Willich spent long months in a Confederate prison as a POW before being released in a prisoner exchange. He was severely wounded at the Battle of Resaca (Georgia)—and never fully recovered from his injuries after returning to his home in St. Marys. A radical communist who considered his countryman Karl Marx to be “too conservative”, Willich’s zeal in fighting the American Civil War was clearly ideological and based on his repugnance toward the institution of slavery embodied by the Confederacy.

My conclusion in thinking about all of this in the midst of current unrest and renewed divisiveness across the US came as something of a revelation to me. Basically it is that it has nothing to do with North and South, Blue and Grey, Yankee and Rebel, or any other political and regional discussion between white Americans. It boils down, rather, to the two and a half century US institution and tradition of slavery and whether we as white people, still support it as “just another part of our history”—albeit one that is vile and contrary to everything that our nation claims to stand for. It isn’t an historical discussion about the industrialized North subjugating the agrarian South. It is about whether we accept slavery, with no moral judgment, as “just how things were back then.” Which, to my mind, is no different than if today’s Germans accepted the Holocaust as “just another chapter in our history” and as “just the way things were back then.”

It is also about whether we continue to honor and glorify, not the South, but the Confederacy as simply part of a cruel Civil War in which all is now forgiven and in which the leaders of the Confederacy and their symbols have been somehow “sanitized”. Whether we accept those Confederate leaders simply as fellow Americans who were in disagreement with Washington about issues that have grown hazy over time. Whether we continue to be willing to leave slavery out of the discussion of efforts to keep alive the practice of honoring symbols and historical players that are emblematic of only one thing—the dark chapter that the enslavement of an entire race has played in our history.

In the end, I have concluded, it is not a discussion that we white people can have or “own”. It’s not ours on which to have an opinion. It is only a valid historical discussion within the history of our African American fellow-citizens. And efforts to keep the symbols and “heroes” of the Confederacy in a place of reverence, rather than within the context of insurrection and slavery, is one of the last hurdles on the road to true racial equality in America.

GOING ROGUE IN THE GOLDEN YEARS

This may sound strange, but lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Ambrose Bierce. Bear with me. At my age, this makes sense, and I think it might make sense to some of you as well.

Scene from a 1962 French film adaptation of "An Occurrence at

Owl Creek Bridge" 

For those of you who don’t remember Ambrose Bierce, he was a famous nineteenth-century American writer, journalist and poet. He was an extraordinary short story writer. Perhaps his best known story—and one of the best known of all stories in modern American literature—is An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a Civil War tale which, in short, is a description of everything that runs through a man’s mind as he is hanged from a railway trestle, from the time he is pushed from the bridge with a rope around his neck until the noose snaps his spine.

Not your lighter, more optimistic literature, mind you, but a masterpiece all the same. Published in 1890 and anthologized for the first of many times in 1891, it is also considered one of the great early examples of stream of consciousness.

Contemporary bestseller Kurt Vonnegut once described the story as “a flawless example of American genius, like ‘Sophisticated Lady’ by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove.” He also defined as “a twerp” anyone who’d never read it. Biographer Richard O’Connor said that “war was the making of Bierce as a man and a writer.” O’Connor praised Bierce for his grim and graphic style, observing that he was “truly capable of transferring the bloody, headless bodies and boar-eaten corpses of the battlefield onto paper.” Even the often jaundiced and disdainful New York Review of Books and Washington Post critic Michael Dirda concedes, if snottily, that Bierce “is arguably the finest not-quite-first-rate writer in nineteenth-century American literature.”

There’s a substantial literary reason, then, why other later extraordinary writers (Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Vladimir Nabokov among them) were influenced by Bierce’s writing—just as he was influenced by Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe and other great and innovative authors who preceded him. But Bierce wasn’t just a writer. He himself was to become the stuff that fiction is made of—the subject of a mystery that remains unsolved and is the topic of vast research and speculation up to the present day.  

Like me, Bierce was born in Ohio, but on the opposite side of the state, in Meigs County, which today borders on West Virginia, an area which is part of the Appalachian region. The tenth of thirteen siblings—all with given names beginning with the letter “A”—while he was still a small child his parents moved to Kosciusko County, in north-central Indiana, where he grew into adolescence. He would eventually attend high school in the town of Warsaw, the county seat.

If he wasn’t born with ink in his veins, young Ambrose would quickly be immersed in it when he struck out on his own at age fifteen and went to work as a printer’s apprentice at an Ohio abolitionist newspaper called, oddly enough, the Northern Indianan. Working at a newspaper was not a random choice. Although he came from a home of humble means, his parents were highly literate people and obviously encouraged him in his love of books and his penchant for storytelling and writing.

Lieutanant Ambrose Bierce, 1862

From the printshop, Ambrose would edge his way into journalism, but that career ended up being interrupted by the US Civil War, in which a still very young Bierce would attain the rank of first lieutenant in the Ninth Indiana Infantry Regiment of the Union Army, and would lead his men in such famous (and infamous) confrontations as Shiloh, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain, the Atlanta Campaign and the Battle of Nashville, among numerous others.

Bierce was cited for bravery in one of the earliest battles in which he took part (and indeed, one of the first of the Civil War) and was seriously wounded at Kennesaw Mountain. Although he spent several months in 1864 on medical furlough because of the head wound he had sustained, he returned to battle in September of that same year and was only discharged from the Army in January of 1865, a few months before the war ended. However, his former commander, General William Hazen (who had recommended Bierce for admission to the military academy at West Point) re-commissioned him in 1866 to take part in an inspection tour of Great Plains Army outposts, a journey which ended up in San Francisco, California. There, Bierce was awarded the largely ceremonial rank of “brevet major” and resigned from the Army forever.

It was there, in San Francisco, however, that Bierce seriously delved into his career as a newspaperman and writer. As a journalist, he attained great acclaim while working as a reporter and columnist for the Hearst family’s San Francisco Examiner, as well as for other publications. He would continue to write for Hearst papers until 1909, just five years before his disappearance and presumed death.

Battle scene from Kennesaw Mountain, where 3,000 Union

soldiers and a thousand Confederates were killed, and where 
Bierce was critically wounded.

Ambrose Bierce’s trenchant commentary and in-depth reporting not only brought him fame, but also the rancor of many of the powerful people he wrote about. It is to the credit of the highly controversial William Randolph Hearst—who in the 1880s inherited the Examiner at age twenty-three and with whom Bierce had an often combative relationship—that, despite what must have been intense pressure to fire Bierce with the aim of silencing him, the famed newspaper owner kept the writer on his payroll for decades. The opposition pressure on Bierce himself was such that he is said to have started carrying a pistol with him wherever he went. As I have learned in my own career as a journalist, if you please everyone with what you write, you’re not doing your job. If you write an in-depth piece or an editorial that elicits praise but no opposition, you need to ask yourself what you’re doing wrong...or find another profession. The irascible if cruelly witty Bierce was the clear embodiment of this principle.

Bierce in the early 20th century

But he was also—like many journalists who are writers first and foremost—a multi-faceted artist who also excelled in satire, short story writing, fantasy and early sci-fi, humor, criticism and poetry above and beyond his notable work as a newsman. Some of his best known work, as O’Connor points out, was based on his vast military and combat experience during the Civil War.

What I’ve been mulling over recently, however, is less about his writing than about his way of approaching life. After an admirable career as a man of letters, Bierce could easily have retired, written the odd story or commentary, traveled a bit, dabbled in his memoirs and been the toast of the town. But that would have been completely out of character for Ambrose Bierce. He was a man of action.

In 1913, at age seventy-one—in an era when the average male life-expectancy in the US was between forty and fifty—Ambrose Bierce had already lived to a ripe old age. But what was left, he must have wondered, to sit in a rocker on the porch and wait for death? Not likely. He hadn’t been a particularly good husband or father, but now even those tenuous ties were pretty much gone. His former wife, Molly Day, had passed away some time before this, but he had already been estranged from her for years by the time she died. Of his three children, only his daughter, Helen, who was nearly forty years old by this time, was left. One of his sons, Raymond Day, had committed suicide in 1889 at age seventeen, and the other one, Leigh, had died of alcoholism-related pneumonia in 1901, aged twenty-seven.     

Some accounts claim that the thought of being put out to pasture was weighing heavily on Bierce when he decided that sitting still wasn’t an option if one was alive, and set off on what was very probably his last great adventure. There are a number of conflicting accounts of where Bierce went and what happened to him, but the most plausible story appears to be that he started out from Washington DC on a research tour of Civil War battlefields that eventually led him to the Texas border with Mexico. He is thought to have crossed the border at El Paso.

Francisco "Pancho" Villa

In Mexico, Bierce supposedly gave free reign to a fantasy he had entertained for some time of catching up to famed Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and riding with him as an observer. Some accounts say that he joined up with Villa in Ciudad Juárez and was at least with the revolutionary for the Battle of Tierra Blanca, which was fought thirty-five miles south of Juárez and was considered a major win for Villa over forces loyal to Mexico’s ruler, Victoriano Huerta.

From there on, the story becomes hazy and speculative. Some versions have Bierce being executed by a detachment of federales for his relationship with Pancho Villa. Others have him being shot as a spy by a rebel firing squad. One town even claims that it was there that he died and has erected a monument that is visited by tourists. But the body of Ambrose Bierce was never found.          

Mexican military ruler Victoriano Huerta

There are strong indications that Bierce accompanied Villa’s army to the city of Chihuahua in northwestern Mexico. In a last letter to his niece, Lora, Bierce is purported to have said that he was writing to say good-bye. “What an intolerable world this would be,” he wrote, “if we said nothing but what is worth saying! And did nothing foolish—like going into Mexico and South America.”

He added that “if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.”

His last communication read: “I don’t know where I shall be next. Guess it doesn’t matter much. Adios.”

Much of Bierce’s fiction is said by critics to highlight “the inscrutability of life and the absurdity of death.” His own disappearance and probably violent death ended up being as inscrutable as it was absurd for a man of his age and literary stature.

Whatever the case may be, while some observers have claimed it was tantamount to suicide for Ambrose Bierce to wonder into the Mexico of Huerta and Villa like some ad hoc septuagenarian foreign correspondent, I consider it a declaration of independence and freedom, and an act of uncommon courage. It was a clear choice to live life to the fullest, right up to his last breath. It’s a philosophy each of us facing the so-called “golden years” might do well to ponder and, to the extent that we can, and each in our own way, to imitate, in the interest of making the absurd worthwhile.