Word: forte
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...award posthumously by throwing himself on a grenade and saving the lives of four multicolored squadmates during a fierce fire fight near Phu Cuong in 1965. The only living Negro Medal of Honor winner in the Viet Nam war is Medic Lawrence Joel, 39, now stationed at Fort Bragg...
Lunatic Moment. Precocious Perry Carlton Lentz, born in Alabama 79 years after the massacre, started writing The Falling Hills as an honors project for a B.A. degree at Kenyon College in Ohio. He mined the eyewitness reports of Fort Pillow survivors as preserved in the National Archives. Now a doddering 24, and an old soldier of the campus (he is taking his Ph.D. in English at Vanderbilt University, Nashville), Lentz has published a book with none of the sweet-magnolia swash and polished ballroom buckle of Gone With the Wind but much of the visceral realism that characterized MacKinlay Kantor...
...grey, move forward to the conflict. On the Confederate side, the standouts are General Forrest, a bombastic, semiliterate slave trader who leads a ferocious cavalry charge, and Captain Hamilton LeRoy Acox, a mild Georgian who, though weary of war, wields a mighty sword in a lunatic moment at Fort Pillow...
...Union side is perhaps more unattractively vivid. Fort Pillow's second-ranking officer is Major Will Bradford, who before the war was a Northern sympathizer in plantation climes. A sleazy, ambitious, jake-leg lawyer, he had run unsuccessfully for the state legislature and vainly courted Good Old Southern Family belles. With secession, he joined the Union army. Knowing clearly enough that no matter who wins the war he will be forced to leave his homeland hills in the end, Bradford lives "in a dry bitterness...
Rude Indignities. Second Lieut. Jonathan Endicott Seabury, a Bostonian idealist and Ivy League mama's boy still wet behind the diploma, is another of Fort Pillow's defenders. He "asked specifically for a colored regiment," dreaming of how he could teach Negro troops "English or history or geography" and monitor the happy spirituals that he fancied they would sing around their fires. He is ill prepared for the reality he encounters: dirty, sly, half-slaves whom he must train to fire fieldpieces without live ammunition. Thus he hides the gradual erosion of his soul by secretly rehearsing...