Free Skin Medicine by Tim Curran

first engagement was at the battle of Wilson’s Creek where all his wide-eyed naivete had been purged from him in the worst possible way. He often thought that it was here that he truly lost his virginity. And if that was true, it was no sweet lovemaking in the dark, but a brutal violation. A rape of all he had known and believed in up to that point. Twelve miles southwest of Springfield, Missouri, on Wilson’s Creek, General Nathaniel Lyon’s Union forces struck at the Confederate lines at five in the morning. The fighting that ensued was savage and horrible. Cabe saw men—men he’d known and trained with—blown to ground meat all around him. He was splattered with their blood and entrails. A grisly baptismal. He crawled through their remains, ducked under their anatomies that dangled from tree limbs like garland, tasted their hot, salty blood on his lips.
    In the billowing smoke and confusion, half out of his mind, all he could hear was the thundering cannonade and the screams of the dying. The 2 nd pulled back from what was known as Bloody Hill, but then through sheer zeal and fortitude, were able to stabilize their positions. The Confederate forces attacked Union positions no less than three times, inflicting and taking horrendous casualties. After the third charge, the Yankee columns fell back to Springfield, but the 2 nd Arkansas and others were just too beaten-up and threadbare to pursue them. The Confederate victory—if you wanted to call it that with some 1200 dead—bolstered Southern sympathy in Missouri, but the cost was staggering.
    Cabe came out of that shocked, distraught, burned and bruised and damaged.
    That was his first taste, his induction into man’s oldest preoccupation.
    After that, the 2 nd was sent to Indian Territory to quell an uprising by the Creeks and Seminoles. By then, Cabe was desensitized by combat and, instead of wanting to run and hide as he had at Wilson’s Creek, he dove into battle viciously. The Indian fighting was often close-in and barbaric and he found that he liked it that way. There was something far too impersonal about putting a ball through a man from a distance or shelling him indiscriminately…when you came at him with pistol and knife, were splashed with his blood and saw his agony, it woke up some primal beast that lusted for more.
    And there was always more.
    Pea Ridge came next.
    The 2 nd Arkansas, mustered into the CS Army of the West and, thrown together under the command of Generals Price and McCulloch, began the bloody affair on the southern tip of the Ozark Mountains. The combined force stood at over 20,000 including 5,000 Indians from the Five Civilized Tribes. With a near-two-to-one superiority in numbers, the Confederates, sensing a sure victory, split their army into two columns and attacked from front and rear. But Curtis, the wily Union general, flanked both Confederate armies and mercilessly pounded them with artillery fire until the Southerners were forced to retreat.
    For Cabe and the 2 nd , it was a living hell.
    There’d been a blizzard a few days before and the weather was bitterly cold. Everyone was tired and hungry and near-frozen when Confederate General Van Dorn forced them into the fight. They deployed just east of Leetown in Morgan’s Woods. Confederate generals McCulloch and McIntosh were killed just two hours into the fighting and the 2 nd was left leaderless, pounded and harassed by the 36 th and 44 th Illinois relentlessly. The Confederate army was now in full retreat, pursed by the 1 st and 2 nd Union Divisions. Cabe’s company, cut off now, took shelter in an abandoned farmhouse.
    Shoes worn to threads, uniforms hanging in ragged strips, Cabe and the others shivered in the cold. Starving, scratched, torn and bleeding, they waited for relief that never came. There was no food to forage and scarcely any blankets or overcoats to keep warm with. Ammunition was long used-up. Many of the men were wounded, some severely. Just a tattered