I had always been fascinated by the massacre at the Little Big Horn… Custer’s arrogance … just our whole military’s arrogance… it was the one place I always wanted to visit… to see the battlefield… to try to visualize what happened there… except… Philip never took vacations… he was always much too busy doing important things... you know… saving the world… making money to solve all of God’s problems in the world… things like that… ad nauseum…
Ellen and I took our first vacation together after we shut down the restaurant in 1994… celebrated her 50th birthday and our 25th anniversary… and spent the summer by driving out West… where… of course… we would end up at the Little Big Horn... it was a great experience… saw many other things than the Little Big Horn.
We stopped at Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming on the way to Montana. We discovered that there was another massacre 10 years before Custer… the Fetterman Massacre… Captain William Fetterman (with the same military arrogance) led 81 men from the Fort to chase a warrior daring them to come out and fight… the warrior was a very young Crazy Horse used as a decoy to bring the soldiers along a ridge where they were surrounded by a thousand Indians… it was all over in an hour. I enjoyed walking that battlefield even more than the Little Big Horn.
The point of all this, is simply background to all the allusions to Custer in the movie We Were Soldiers…. so many… Colonel Hal Moore was commanding the 7th Cavalry... their horses were their helicopters as they prepared to bring their 395 soldiers into a trap where they would be surrounded by 2000 VietCong regulars…
Tomorrow, I will also let you know about how Fetterman appeared as well… amazing how that military arrogance just continues on and on… well… not really amazing … just my natural man showing itself off.
Glad I finally learned that the only way out of all my disasters is by His divine interference…. so many stories…
More details tomorrow…
🙂