A

s a child I watched the redcoats drill on the green in front of the Governer's Mansion at Williamsburg, Virginia. Or somewhere in that town.

The jaunty costumes blazed with history. The musket's roar hurt my ears and frightened me like a carnival ride even as I waited, too thrilled to breathe, to be startled again.

It was the acrid fog of gunsmoke that troubled me, that same whiff of black powder that blinded and choked me in college hearing the detail like a grim joke, that guns are recovered from civil war battlefields, ball after ball tamped into their gullets, never fired by desperate soldiers enveloped in smoke.

Reposted July 3, 2003

By Ruby Jung. All rights reserved to the story. I made the graphic and the background and you're welcome to use them.