From TWE APRIL 27. 1865 / THE WRECK OF THE SULTANA Greed is a demo thirsting for more, no matter the consequences; an unwavering hunger wreaking havoc on any innocents standing in its rapacious way. Military contracts are a cash cow that heartless predators cant resist. So graft had a comfortable place at Camp Fisk near Vicksburg where steamboat captains would come to the quartermasters office to vie for passengers heading north at three dollars a head for enlisted personnel, and ten dollars a head of officers. This human baggage being fought over as a source of enormous profit were Union soldiers recently arrived from the hell-holles of Andersonville and other Confederate military prisons; now that a courtly sword had been exchanged in Virginia. And because there was as much confusion as outright corruption involved in the record keeping at Camp Fisk; the exact number of soldiers that boarded the Sultana, and their exact identities based on the spellings of semi-literatate signatures will never be known. What is know is that the Sultana had a normal carrying capacity of 370. On a late April evening over 2400 people, more than six times the number that should have been aboard, disembarked from Vicksburg for the slow journey to Cairo, Illinois, on a Mississippi running hard and cold with swollen snowmelt. What the Sultanas captain kept to himself, was that one of the four boilers on the boat was damaged; and had been hastily and badly repaired; in order that he not miss out on this bonanza of a payday. So at two AM on April 27, 1865, eighteen days after Appomattox, thirteen days after Lincolns assassination; three of the four boilers blew; and over seventeen hundred human beings were blown to bits, burned to death, or drown in the Mississippi just north of Memphis Tennessee. The names and the faces of the contractors and their military accomplices have changed over the years; but a greed beyond any sense of decency or humanity continues to feather its evil nest. Whether it is the fate of Revolutionary War veterans, Douglas McArthur destroying the World War One veterans Hooverville in July of 1932, or the bureaucratic indifference to the fate meted out to American troops by atomic bomb testing, Agent Orange, or depleted uranium; Americas senior leadership has no trouble turning a blind eye to its cannon fodder. For all of us, veterans and civilians alike, are nothing but so much kibble being ded to their dogs of war.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 13:23:15 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015