Word: battlefield
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Georgian officials and CIA sources charge. A minority of only 17% in their own homeland, the Abkhazians have turned to Russia for help. Georgians are convinced that vindictive Russian army officers, bent on taking revenge for the role Shevardnadze played in the collapse of the Soviet empire, are providing battlefield intelligence plus Russian Grad missiles and SU-25 fighters to the Abkhazians, who previously were armed with shotguns and hunting rifles. Outside observers suspect that assistance comes from free-lancing local commanders without the approval of political leaders in Moscow. But the distinction makes little difference to Georgian soldiers...
...people, I will fight. I will fight if anyone tries to enslave us, but nothing short of the defense of life and freedom could make me take up arms. "National interest," "ancestral rights" and an extra bedroom for the nation are not reasons to go out to the battlefield...
Svenson provides an intriguing account of the battle. He gradually reveals its specific details through powerful firsthand accounts and battlefield reports. One of his most striking sources is the diary of a Confederate Major, who narrates the events up to the middle of the battle when he himself is shot and killed while writing. Others include the memoirs of Confederate General Isaac Trimble, the 68-year-old unlikely hero of the Confederate victory and General John Fremont, the Union commander whose miscalculations and lack of offense caused his army to lose the battle to a Confederate opponent half its size...
...battle itself forms only about half of Svenson's narrative. Battlefield is, after all, not the story of a single event but the story of a place. As Svenson builds his new house there, successfully harvests a crop of hay, and tries to eliminate the rampant groundhog population, he comes to recognize that his land, like the battle which took place there, is unique. His farm and the surrounding land have their own historical evolution, like any other part of the American landscape, which happens to have been punctuated by the military confrontation which took place there in June...
Peter Svenson's Battlefield fulfills its image in the preface as "one small niche of Americana, peopled with real individuals and placed in a real setting." Splitting his narrative between the 1860s and 1980s, with several historical stops along the way, Svenson creates a personal and historical reflection. He tells essentially two stories while uniting them behind one central idea. Battlefield reminds us that real history exists beneath the "polemics." It may not put Cross Keys on the popular map of American History, but it does restore a sense of that history as a continuum of past, present and future...