🇺🇸 Joshua Chamberlain spent his first night in battle lying between two dead men. He used a third for a pillow. The 20th Maine hit Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, then got stuck on the slope by heavy Confederate fire. No orders to pull back, so they stayed put through the cold night. Most of the men had dropped their coats and blankets earlier. Chamberlain wrote later that he laid down between two dead soldiers. He then dragged a third one over crosswise for a pillow and used the flap on that soldier’s coat across his face to cut the wind and the noise of the wounded. He and a few others spent hours moving around giving water and taking last words for families back home. They held the spot into the next day under fire. When they finally got the order to leave the following night, they buried their own dead first with bayonets and fragments of shell. Chamberlain wrote the whole thing down years later. The 20th Maine was present at Antietam but held in reserve. Fredericksburg was their baptism by fire.

Chamberlains own words on that night “Necessity compels strange uses. For myself it seemed best to bestow my body between two dead men among the many left there by earlier assaults, and to draw another crosswise for a pillow out of the trampled, blood-soaked sod, pulling the flap of his coat over my face to fend off the chilling winds, and still more chilling the deep, many-voiced moan that overspread the field. It was heart-rending; it could not be borne.”

🇺🇸 The B-52 bomber sitting by the front gate of the Air Force Academy has a confirmed MiG-21 kill. Christmas Eve, 1972. North Vietnam. Operation Linebacker II was underway. Riding in the tail of a B-52D nicknamed Diamond Lil was 18 year old Airman Albert Moore. His job was tail gunner and he manned four .50-caliber machine guns. He spotted the blip on his radar. A North Vietnamese MiG-21 fighter was closing in from behind, climbing rapidly. Moore tracked the interceptor on his radar scope, waited until the jet was within 2,000 yards, and held down the triggers. Seconds later, the crew of a trailing B-52 confirmed it over the radio: the MiG was engulfed in a fireball and falling from the sky. Over 800 rounds went downrange. In the entire history of aviation, a B-52 bomber has shot down an enemy fighter jet exactly twice. Albert Moore became the last aerial tail gunner in American military history to score a kill in combat. Today, cars drive past that exact plane at the north entrance of the Air Force Academy in Colorado, completely unaware the gate guard is a certified MiG killer.

🇺🇸 This New Testament was carried in Walter G. Jones’s blouse pocket. It stopped a bullet in the pages. Twice. Jones was a Private in Company C, 8th New York Cavalry. At Cedar Creek, Virginia, on October 19, 1864, a bullet struck the upper corner. Months later, during the fighting around Appomattox, another bullet hit near the center. In each case the small book stopped the shot. He kept the book and the two bullets. Later he wrote this caption: “I am not a Hobson, a Dewey, a Schley, nor a Sampson, but I was a High Private in Co. C., 8th N. Y. Cavalry and carried this little Testament in my blouse pocket which, in two battles, saved my life from bullets, as represented in the above photo. The bullet in the upper corner was shot at me at Cedar Creek, Va., October 19, 1864. The bullet in the centre crashed into the Testament during the battle of Appomattox (better known as Lee’s surrender), April 8th and 9th, 1865.” Signed Walter G. Jones, McDonough, N.Y. Jones survived the war, mustered out in June 1865, and returned home to McDonough, New York. Library of Congress Photo

🇺🇸 This coming weeks topics from me (Sunday thru Saturday): Joshua Chamberlain, Military Academies, and Common Civil War Soldiers Photos/Stories. If you have any topics you would like me to do in the future, please leave a note below. Going to try breaking weeks down like this as a trial. Helps me organize a little better. This last week I did Robert E. Lee and Flag Stories (X did not like those for some reason) if you didn’t notice.

🇺🇸 UPDATE: I was able to connect with Alex after my post. He and his father took this first ever photo together with the flag they both carried in combat to share with us. Adam Cesario raised it every day in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne. Alex (@AirborneBunker) proudly carried it in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne, including when he earned a Purple Heart. Same flag. Two generations. Two different wars. Thank you BOTH for your service! 🫡🇺🇸

🇺🇸 This is the Star-Spangled Banner. One of its stars is missing. Not shot away. Cut out. It’s an unsolved mystery who has it. Mary Pickersgill sewed the flag in Baltimore in the summer of 1813. It flew over Fort McHenry in 1814. Francis Scott Key wrote our national anthem to it. It measured at that time about 30 by 42 feet. The fort’s commander, George Armistead, kept it. It passed to his widow Louisa, then his daughter Georgiana, then his grandson Eben Appleton. People kept asking for pieces. Veterans. Dignitaries. Friends. They gave away dozens of small pieces. Nearly eight feet came off the end of the flag. Georgiana wrote: “Indeed had we given all we had been importuned for, little would be left to show.” Louisa cut out a whole star. She gave it to someone as an honor. Nobody knows who. Nobody knows when. It was already gone when the flag was photographed in 1873. Eben lent the flag to the Smithsonian in 1907, then gave it for good. Today it measures about 30 by 34 feet. Some snipped fragments have come back to the museum. They cannot be sewn on again. Nobody is sure where each one came from. One rumor says the star went into Lincoln’s grave. There is no proof. Somewhere there is a star from THE actual Star-Spangled Banner.

🇺🇸 President Abraham Lincoln personally signed Robert E. Lee’s promotion. Lee had returned from Texas in March 1861 as a lieutenant colonel of the 2nd Cavalry. Shorty after, his commission was signed by the new president to colonel of the 1st Cavalry. Lee accepted the rank “without hesitation,” which he had the option to decline per 19th century standards. It reaffirmed his oath to the United States. He held the position only a few weeks. After Virginia seceded he resigned his commission on April 20. The rest is history.

🇺🇸 After the September 11 attacks, three friends in Freeport, Maine, began a weekly flag vigil that lasted 18 years. Elaine Greene, JoAnn Miller, and Carmen Footer stood at the corner of Main and School Streets every Tuesday morning with American flags. They started the week after the attacks and kept going. During the Iraq War they stood every day. Rain, snow, heat, and illness did not stop them. They also sent care packages to troops overseas, greeted soldiers at airports, visited the wounded, and attended military funerals across Maine. Their purpose was simple: support the troops and never forget. They ended the weekly gatherings in September 2019. Carmen Footer died in 2023. JoAnn Miller died in 2025. Elaine Greene is the last surviving Freeport Flag Lady.

🇺🇸 This is Robert E. Lee’s famed horse Traveller’s skeleton. After Lee’s death, the horse took a long, strange journey. Traveller was led in Lee’s funeral procession in 1870, riderless behind the caisson, his saddle and bridle draped in black crepe. About a year later he stepped on a nail, developed tetanus, and was put down. He was buried on the Washington College grounds, but the bones were later dug up, bleached, and exhibited in Rochester, New York. In 1907, for the centennial of Lee’s birth, Richmond journalist Joseph Bryan paid to have the skeleton mounted and returned to Washington and Lee. It went on public display in the Brooks Museum of Natural History, then moved under Lee Chapel around 1929, where it stood for decades. Students carved their initials into the bones for good luck. By the early 1960s the remains had deteriorated badly. During chapel renovations they were taken off display, stored in a dorm basement, and finally given a proper burial in 1971 outside Lee Chapel, near the Lee family crypt, where he remains today. Tradition holds that the doors of his old stable are left open so Traveller’s spirit can come and go.