I Didn’t Have A Choice

May 4, 1864

Camp near the Rapidan River, Virginia

The rain fell hard this morning. It came not in sheets, but in sharp needles, stabbing the canvas of my tent and waking me before the bugler’s call. I sat upright on my cot, heart pounding as though the drops had been bullets. For a moment I thought I was back at Stones River, watching Private Kessler’s head snap back under fire. But it was just the storm.

I lit a lantern and took to my journal. I have always written more on days like this, when the weather claws at the skin and the war scratches at the soul. The pages bear witness when men do not.

Today, I must write of something that will not let me be.

There was a boy.

He wore Union blue, but he could not have been more than fifteen. About the age of my Thomas.

He had hair the color of summer wheat and eyes the pale gray of Tennessee fog. He had been caught scouting too close to our perimeter, just before dawn, by Corporal Hughes. The men were rough with him at first—grabbing him by the collar, shouting, calling him “bluebellied rat.” But I ordered them to ease up. He was no spy. He was barely even a soldier.

He looked at me with wide, unblinking eyes. I remember how his lower lip trembled but his back stayed straight. He said his name was Eli.

“From Ohio,” he added, as if that excused him.

“What are you doing here, boy?” I asked.

“I’m with the 9th Infantry, sir. I was sent to find water. We haven’t had a decent drink in two days.”

He called me “sir,” even as my men tied his hands. The irony was not lost on me.

There are rules to this war—gentleman’s agreements, codes of honor. We trade prisoners. We care for the wounded. But the line grows thinner every day, and men forget civility when their bellies are empty and their boots rot from the inside.

Still, the boy had not fired a weapon. He had not killed anyone. His only crime was wearing the wrong color.

But command was clear: no quarter for enemy scouts near the river. Especially not now, with rumors of a major Union push. General Ewell himself had passed down the order. We are to hold this stretch with fire and steel, no matter the cost.

Still, I hesitated.

The men stood around, waiting for me to speak. The boy’s lips pressed together, and I saw then—he understood.

“I didn’t mean to come so close, sir,” he said quietly. “I—I was only looking for water.”

The silence dragged, and finally, I asked him, “How old are you?”

“Sixteen, sir,” he said quickly, but I could see the lie in his eyes. I wager he was barely fifteen.

The same age Thomas had been when he fell ill last spring. Had things been different, Thomas might have been here, standing in that boy’s place, begging for life from a man with a revolver and a clean collar.

I walked away from the circle of men, hoping the rain would soak the guilt from my skin. It did not.

I returned an hour later. The boy had not moved. His uniform hung from him like a coat on a fencepost. He was shivering.

I pulled Sergeant Dodd aside.

“We could tie him to a tree, let the next patrol take him north.”

Sergeant Dodd looked at me with hard eyes.

“You know the order, Captain. No prisoners. No scouts. That’s what command said.”

“I know,” I said. “But he’s just a boy.”

Dodd spat in the mud. “They don’t send boys out unless they want ‘em to get shot. Yankees play by different rules, sir.”

I looked around at my men—worn down, bitter, soaked to the bone, their eyes empty. We had all lost too much. Brothers. Friends. Futures.

Still.

I ordered the men to fall back fifty yards and told them I’d handle it myself.

I took Eli by the arm and led him into the woods. He didn’t resist. He walked like a lamb, stumbling over roots and rocks, not crying, not pleading. When we stopped, he looked around as though he expected to see angels or devils waiting in the mist.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said. It was the first time he sounded like a child.

“I know,” I said.

I drew my revolver, and for a long moment, I couldn’t raise it.

He turned his head and closed his eyes.

And I said it.

“I didn’t have a choice.”

I meant it. God help me, I meant it.

When the shot rang out, even the rain seemed to stop for a heartbeat.

I buried him myself, under an oak not far from the bend in the river. I used my hands at first, scraping through the wet earth. Eventually I found a fallen limb strong enough to dig with. I said no words. What right did I have?

The men didn’t ask questions when I returned. Dodd gave me a long look but said nothing. I doubt he thought I had the stomach to go through with it.

But I did.

I returned to my tent and changed my shirt. Burned the other.

And now I write. Because I must.

Because someday this war will end, and someone will find these pages. And they must know—

That boy had a name. Eli.

He had hair like my Thomas and eyes that saw too much for one so young. He had no rifle. No saber. Only an empty canteen and a duty to his men.

He died not because he was the enemy.

But because I followed orders.

Because war makes monsters out of men who once read bedtime stories to their sons and kissed their wives with soft lips.

Because I believed the lie that honor survives in a slaughterhouse.

I didn’t have a choice.

But I had a voice.

And it is writing now.

May 5, 1864

Camp still by the river

Dawn broke without fanfare. The rain stopped sometime in the night. Mist clung to the grass and hung low over the tents. The men moved slowly, as if they too felt the weight of what yesterday brought.

I could not sleep. I dreamed of a boy in blue, standing at the edge of a clearing, water dripping from his hair. He did not speak. He only watched.

The fog today reminds me of home. Of the hill behind our house where Thomas and I used to hunt squirrels, long before secession was spoken in earnest. I remember the crunch of leaves, the whisper of wind, the warmth of his hand in mine when he was too small to walk the path alone.

He’s grown now—seventeen next month. Too young to be in uniform, though many younger wear it with pride. I begged him to stay out of it, to mind his mother, to watch over the farm. He promised me he would.

But letters grow scarce, and I fear he no longer sees honor in silence.

If he picks up a musket, will someone like me find him in a clearing and say, “I didn’t have a choice?”

God forbid.

May 6, 1864

Spotsylvania looms

Word reached us that Grant has crossed the Rapidan. We move soon. The men polish rifles and mutter names of battles they barely survived. The younger ones speak with foolish eagerness, as if death is a song they cannot wait to hear.

I write a letter to my wife. I do not mention Eli.

I say the rain has passed and the food is fair. I say I dream of her smile and of biscuits fresh from the oven. I tell her to marry her sister’s widower if I should fall. I enclose a pressed wildflower for Thomas. I tell him to keep it safe.

But here, in this journal, I write what I cannot speak aloud.

I killed a child.

And though the world may excuse me, I know the truth.

I stood at the edge of manhood and made a choice that cannot be unmade.

And I will carry his name until my last breath.

Eli.

Let no one forget.

May 8, 1864

Evening, somewhere near Laurel Hill

The battle is joined.

The woods burned today. Acres of forest, lit like candles, the wind carrying flame faster than bullets. Men screamed in the fire—blue and gray alike—and neither side dared enter the inferno to save them. The earth smokes still.

I saw a boy, no older than Eli, run into the blaze after his brother. He did not return.

Later, under a pine tree half-scorched by fire, I knelt and wept.

For the boy.

For the brother.

For myself.

I no longer care which side wins. There is no victory in this. Only names carved into stone.

May 10, 1864

Final entry, in case I fall

If this journal is found, I ask only this:

Tell my son I tried to be a good man. That I wrote him bedtime stories even after the war began. That I remembered the color of his hair each morning. That I once held his hand in the woods.

Tell him that I saw a boy once, wearing the wrong uniform, and that I—

That I didn’t have a choice.

But maybe, one day, he will.

He will have a choice to forgive, to build, to grow flowers where the graves lie now.

If you find Eli’s name in these pages, write it down somewhere else. Say it out loud. Plant a tree for him. One with strong roots.

And if you have a son, hold him close tonight.

Hold him close.

[Journal of Captain Nathaniel Reed, Confederate Army, 2nd Virginia Infantry. Recovered in the Wilderness Battlefield, May 1864.]

Donated to the National Museum of Civil War History, 1889. Displayed beside a faded photograph of a young boy in Union blue.