One soldier's last full measure

By Steve Janoski

For those of us born in the shadow of the new millennium, the very idea of knowing anything about the daily life of a man born in the 1830s might seem slightly crazy.

But for some, like 25-year-old Antietam park ranger Dan Vermilya, who routinely walks the fields where his great-great-great-grandfather Elwood Rodebaugh was killed 150 years ago, not only knowing that story, but retelling it, has become a way to show people that, as Faulkner said, "The past isn't dead. It's not even past."

Rodebaugh's figure has always loomed over the native Ohioan's life in one way or another — as a child, his grandfather used to tell him the story about the young man who went off to war back in 1861, and the tale sparked a lifelong passion for learning about the conflict. Eventually, it led him to choose a profession that carried him back to these same acres that once soaked up the blood of that man, whose narrative he has filled out through his own research.

Rodebaugh, he said, was a 30-year-old Pennsylvania shoemaker when the Civil War erupted in 1861. He and his wife Josephine (just 25 at the time) had two young children: a 4-year-old daughter named Heloise and a 3-year-old boy named Charles.

Had this family man chosen to stay home and ignore the bloodletting, he would have hardly been the only one (especially in the North), but whatever convictions compelled him to enlist in the 106th Pennsylvania in the summer of that year must have been deeply-held, because they sustained him through heavy fighting in Virginia during the spring of 1862 and into the fall.

And on Sept. 17, Rodebaugh's unit was at Antietam, charged with the unenviable task of storming a section of rebel line that sat in what's now known as the West Woods. It's here that words frustratingly fail the writer, because there is no way to adequately describe what must have been a scene of chaotic violence; though many of us have undoubtedly felt similar sensations — the tunnel vision, machine-gun heart rate, the shaking hands — at least once in our lives when we've felt threatened, how can we who have never seen true combat understand that kind of terror?

It was a vicious fight, to be sure, one that went on too long and took too many lives. Vermilya has read numerous accounts, and said that it appears that Rodebaugh was last seen along a fence-line, desperately trying to make a stand against the rebels who had fallen with crushing weight on the Union flank. At some point after that — it's not known how or when — he became one of the 23,000 to fall upon that field.

And when Rodebaugh received his fatal wound, be it by bullet or artillery shell, we will never know where his final thoughts wandered as he lay dying on the soft Maryland grass — this again, we can only imagine. Unfortunately, Vermilya said, Rodebaugh had shaved his beard just before the battle, which made him unrecognizable to the burial parties. As such, no grave or monument marks where he fell.

Perhaps the saddest part of all, however, is that this is but one of thousands upon thousands of stories from that war just like it; in the end, that's why Vermilya tells it.

So as the tall, lean ranger approaches the same age his distant relative was when he died, one man's tragedy has become a way to illuminate the fact that history was not fought in the ivory pages of history books, but in the fields, and that every dot of ink in that blue line on the battlefield map was a man (or, more likely, a boy of 18 or 20) who had a mother he loved, a father he respected, a girlfriend or wife he missed uncontrollably, a son or daughter who was everything to him.

Working at Antietam has made the story more important, and more emotional, than ever before.

"In general, working as a park ranger carries the responsibility of knowing how important this battle was, but to know that I had a direct bloodline to it…. it's (become) more than just a professional obligation. It's a personal obligation," said Vermilya. "It reminds us that these battles are fought not by lines on a map, not by numbers in a book, but real people with real families making sacrifices for the things that they believe in. 150 years ago, tremendous sacrifices were made (at Antietam), and they were selfless sacrifices."

The ranger has a blog entitled "Our Country's Fiery Ordeal," where he goes into great detail about his thoughts on that most brutal of wars. In one passage, he quotes historian Dr. Joseph Harsh, who wrote that we should honor the soldiers' legacy, "For we are the future for whom they fought."

For Vermilya, that is quite literally true, and he must never let us forget that.

Dan Vermilya's blog on the Civil War and Antietam can be found at fieryordeal.blogspot.com.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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