All the Soldiers Gone - What the Dog Knows - page 133

concern for the Confederate dead stood in stark contrast,” wrote Drew Gilpin Faust in his
Republic of Suffering, , her recent history of death in the Civil War. An Atlantic magazine writer
on a tour of Virginia shortly after the war, Faust noted, came upon two bodies in the wil-
derness. His guide examined their uniform buttons. “They was No'th Carolinians; that's why
they didn't bury 'em,” the guide informed a horrified John Trowbridge.
Civil War historian J. David Hacker now thinks that earlier estimates of 620,000 men dy-
ing on both sides—a figure that has stood since the nineteenth century—was far below the
actual number. His most recent work puts that number at 20 percent higher: that the war
was responsible for more like 750,000 men dying.
But what do these numbers mean? Why do they matter? Partly, as Hacker, an assiduous
and brilliant historian, notes, “it's our duty to get it right.” His new estimate suggests that
more men died as a result of the Civil War than from all other American wars combined.
And yet all too often we count everything—and understand nothing.
In the Pacific Theater during World War II, journalist Ernie Pyle drafted what was to be
his final column. It was found in his pocket when his body was recovered on the island of
Ie Shima on April 18, 1945. He had been shot by a Japanese machine gunner: “Dead men
by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year.
Dead men in winter and dead men in summer. Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that
they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to
hate them. These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand.”
• • •
E pluribus unum . Out of many, one.
Although there were scattered reports of Israel using dogs during the Sinai War in 1973, it
took until 2003 for the U.S. military, which had been involved in the earliest experiments on
the feasibility of cadaver dogs, to use them to recover dead soldiers. Even then it was a modest
yet controversial experiment—to send just one man and his two German shepherds from the
Northeast into the jungles of Vietnam to look for MIAs who had disappeared decades before.
The military sent Rhode Island state trooper Matt Zarrella. It was February, and Vietnam
was hotter than Rhode Island. Matt's nine-year-old female shepherd, Panzer, was panting.
His one-year-old male, Maximus, was panting. As well as they could. The nervous Viet-
namese pilots had insisted that the two dogs be muzzled before they climbed into the heli-
copter to fly toward the southernmost tip of Vietnam. Now they were over rice paddies where
the craters from carpet bombing from decades before were still visible. The temperatures in-