kinship of war

Big sap that I am, I cry at everything, romantic comedies, old sitcom reruns, the newspaper, you name it. But in eight hours of Ken Burns, I didn't shed a single tear. Not even when Sam Waterston read the Gettysburg Address, which by all rights should have put me over the edge. And then in the final hour, I got overwhelmed. It seems when William Tecumseh Sherman died, in the winter of 1891, General Joseph E. Johnston, against whom Sherman had fought his way through the South, was a pallbearer in his funeral. It caught me off-guard how immediately I got choked up at that fact. I wonder how the souls of men become entwined when, without knowing each other, they fight each other in battle, track each other and try to anticipate the other's next movement. It must be a bond like no other, terrifying that war could make men know their opponents so intimately that they would carry each other into death, even years after peace has broken.