Gettysburg

Most nights in ninth grade, after the rest of my family was asleep, I snuck into the upstairs game room and turned on the computer, hoping that the loud buzzing and beeping of the dial-up modem wouldn’t wake my parents downstairs. As the blue light of the monitor bathed my face, I logged on to Mplayer, where I gathered with a few dozen others in order to delve into the deepest mysteries of the long ago Battle of Gettysburg. Our medium of study was the 1997 real-time strategy game Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! which distilled the battle into a dozen or so scenarios that we replayed endlessly in infinite combinations.

We organized into rival groups called clans. The Confederate clans were more popular, but I joined the sole Union clan: the Grand Army of the Republic, or GAR for short. Named after the largest post-war Union veterans’ organization, GAR was organized into brigades, divisions, and corps modeled on the actual order of battle at Gettysburg. As a new recruit, I was assigned the persona of one of the junior regimental commanders, Colonel Patrick Kelly of the famed Irish Brigade. When hostilities against the Confederates began, Kelly, who had immigrated to New York City from Ireland following the potato famine in 1846, immediately joined the state militia — then the 88th Volunteer Infantry of the Union Army — and went on to distinguish himself at the battles of Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg. His men knew him as a fine horseman and courageous fighter, and they followed him regardless of the odds against them. When under intense fire at Antietam, bullets whizzing past, he turned to his troops and exaggerated his Irish brogue for humorous effect, smiling and telling them to “lie down, byes [boys], thim little fellows might hurt yez.”

As a skinny Indian kid who’d never fired a gun in my life, I inhabited Kelly’s role surprisingly well. Using a few simple command buttons arrayed at the bottom of the screen, I maneuvered our forces at the Devil’s Den, Little Round Top, and the Wheatfield, sending pixelated men around the map on double-time marches, anticipating opposing flanking actions, and positioning artillery on the high ground. As the sound of rifle fire crackled through the tinny stock speakers stationed on either side of my keyboard, casualties mounted in real time, soldiers falling onscreen, canned sound effects urging us still onward towards victory. Our actions were governed by arcane rules, and the outcomes were graded according to who held the most valuable positions at the end of each scenario. The game would signal a Confederate victory with a series