I am fifteen years old. I have a job. You would consider me hero, while others who work with me think I am just an annoying little boy here just to get in the way. I feel that way, too. But I want respect. I DEMAND respect. I don't want to be drivin to murdering someone because of the way my mass- produced uniform doesn't fit. My body is small compared to the men who walk before me.
I often spend so much of my time wandering around my regiment trying to find a face I once knew and was friendly to me before. I get so frustrated when I don't find one. Sometimes, off in the woods, I sit down and cry. No one is around me, so I feel there. It is pretty disappointing. I wanted an adventure. Instead we get to parade along the abandonded roads. All that walking kicks up a lot of dust, which gets in to the eyes, eyebrows, nose, and even the mouth. We spend weeks at a time in one single place, sometimes cut off from important supplies.
After some time marching to Gettysburg, our dreams had finally come true: we got to fight. But our dream... it was much different then from what we actually had to do. It was terrible. Some of the other boys who had become my friends just last night I saw them pitch backward, dead, into the underbrush, never to be indentified as anyone in particular when -if- found. I couldn't concentrate on fighting- thoughts and tears clouded my vision and stopped me from shooting. I swivled around and darted off into the deep woods. The thought of the underage boys like me getting shot and killed and not being found, leaving their families to wonder day in and day out until they die... 'what ever happened to my son who I had loved so much?'
I hoped that one day I could be as honored as them. They died to try to make men free. They died because the wanted to have one great nation we bravely fought one hundred years earlier so hard to make our own to be sculpted to what we wanted it to be. Not two seperate nations who we would be constantly at war with over taking men from their own country to serve our greedy purposes.
I bit my tongue and turned back toward the battlefield. President Lincoln called me and five hundred thousand other men forth to help rebuild this house divided against itself so it can stand once more. I charged forward, doing what Lincoln told me to do, and went ahead to fight with my bayonet guiding my way.
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This was just more of a thought than an actual story. We are studying this in school right now, and I jut typed this up instead of one long story I'll never get to finishing.