My confident, hopeful fellow Republicans, I have heard and read countless accounts of witnesses to war.  Most of these stories had come from Civil War veterans of many ranks.  In comparing all my readings from memoirs and published letters from that war with those that I have also read from the world wars and Vietnam, I've learnt that the Civil War was by far the most insanely horrible, terrible, and tragic.  Ironically, all this terror and blood was not produced by a Hun or a jap but rather the volunteer forces that answered Lincoln's call to destroy and wipe out the independence of the Southern states. 
More often than not, especially in the war's first couple of years, the gray lines faced north and the blue, south.  Ranks of tens of thousands of Southern men were all that separated the Federal armies and the complete sacking, burning, and conquering of the South beyond the rear of the Southern defenses.  Often, Confederate soldiers from Tennessee, Virginia, or Georgia would find themselves charging the enemy across their own lawns, careful not to shoot the cows. 
In fact, at the battle of Gettysburg, there was a Confederate private by the name of John Wesley Culp from that village.  Those that know something of the battlefield know that Union Commander, Maj General Meade's northern right flank constructed its defenses on the hill, known locally as Culps Hill.  Pvt. John's family owned it.  He was killed less than a mile from his home. 

The battlefield deaths would have made even the opponents of the Geneva Convention squirm.  The technology of small arms and artillery had advanced further in the twenty years leading up to the Civil War than what was advanced for three hundred years prior.  Spiral rifling became mandatory for all military rifles.  Musket balls were modified to the revelations of a Frenchman named Mini, a cone shape rather than a round ball with three groves around its length to catch the spirals in the rifles.  This increased the accuracy of the rifle from twenty-thirty yards to five hundred to one thousand, depending on the terrain. 
The tightly packed ranks and battle lines that had been crucial for soldiers with inaccurate weapons (putting enough smooth bores into one place increased the likelihood of somebody hitting something) surprisingly did not receive the same advancements as the weapons of war.  These shoulder to shoulder battle lines hardly ever stood up to a defensive position armed with the latest. 
Even loading had become more efficient.  The Mississippi rifles was the first of their kind to include a simple mechanism to ignite the powder.  Where before it was the clumsy, messy, and some times dangerous flint stone and powder pan, useless in the land, by the late 1840s, the percussion cap nipple had replaced the pan and the flint was replaced by the rugged and simple percussion caps.
Whether it was the Federals at Cold Harbor or the Confederates at Franklin, regardless of the size of these forces, they would fail miserably while advancing on a well dug in position. 
Artillery had advanced in the same ways of the rifles of that period...spiraled bores, shells molded the same shape as the mini ball, and cannon were converted to fire by the simple tug of a rope.  Some Confederate batteries even included the ahead of its time, Whitsworth breech loading artillery pieces that could send shells up to two miles.  Quite a feat for a light artillery piece! 
These guns got bigger and more dead.  Field pieces also included a mobile arsenal that not only included solid shot but also canister (a can filled with dozens of golf ball sized projectiles.  It was a big shot gun. 
Men were torn to pieces by the artillery.  The small arms fire could be just as grooving.  For when the exceptionally slow musket ball entered a soldier's flesh, it would pan out to almost twice its size, loose its momentum and become like a pin ball in the body often going in one way and tearing out the other leaving broken bones and organs. 
The field hospitals were more deadly than these weapons for the doctors of the time had no clue about germs.  The same cutting blades and other instruments used on some patients were used on others, washed only for a moment in a blood tainted water pot.  Infection killed so many.  And the conditions of thousands of men from different parts of the North and South pressed into great groups caused outbreaks of all the deadly diseases of the time, most common pneumonia, pox, or diarrhea...all killers. 
The POW camps killed plenty more.  Despite all the attention given to Andersonville, more Confederate soldiers died in Northern prisons than in Southern ones.  This is especially strange considering the North had a lot more resources to care for its prisoners.  Instead, thousands of Southerns died at Elmira, Camp Douglass (my own great great uncle died there) and Point Lookout. 
Lastly, during that war hundreds of thousands of unarmed and helpless civilians were either killed, raped, starved, or made homeless in the South by Northern assaults on Jackson, Columbia, New Orleans, Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, Savannah, Petersburg, and Vicksburg. 

Yet, even when I hear some of McCain's stories on being a POW in the Vietnam war or even some of those from the citizens of Vicksburg that had to dig caves to replace their homes when the Federals shelled their community for months, I can't help but feel that our nation's most decorated war heroes have not seen a more sadder side of hell on this earth.  I won't argue that seeing your comrades and mess mates die in a burst of red or slowly on a cot is a despair that I would not wish to know.  Killing others, even the enemy, would be high up there in despair. 

Yet soldiers as well as the citizens in Vicksburg stuck together, banded together to either save lives or help their cause.
But I challenge McCain or any other to visit Sand Hill in Augusta to happen upon something probably worse.  How so?

As terrible as it is, in war there is the sense of honor, duty, and sacrifice regardless of the cost of war's want of blood.  Yet, in this community in Augusta from the lawn of Saint Augustine’s castle church that also serves as the intersection of Washington and Northern Avenue to Monroe Street, on Sand Hill there are things that are worse. 

Here we have people that are not dying from battlefield wounds but self inflicted ones.  Here the American dream seems as distant as Washington DC.  While men and women serve to protect our freedom, the citizens of these parts choose not to honor any of these values our soldiers fight for.  They exist only to consume.  Friends only exist to aid in battles against neighbors provoked by rumors or differences.  Parents have children to receive government benefits, and most of the many, many, people here on disability income neither deserve it or need it any more than the most productive worker. 
These people are lazy, spoiled, vindictive, and crazy.  They are defeated, plagued, and live only outdated trends that haven taken years to finally reach Maine. When Maine cut back on its mental health funds the state hospital was forced to release dozens of critically messed up patients.  They now mostly live on Sand Hill, screaming, thrashing, and ticking like time bombs.   Sand Hill's population of a thousand or more has a higher concentration of sex offenders than in any other community I've lived in.  In fact, many of them live across the street from or live in the same apartment building as children. 

Joe the plumber is does not represent this place or its voters.  If asked to live on Sand Hill for one year, on Stewart Lane or Washington Avenue or Jefferson Street, I am confident that both McCain and Obama would have either something new to their conscience and campaign promises or either continue not to consider the people's plight, as they have all along any how. 

War exists but in these wars there are victories and causes.  There are battles upon Sand Hill.  Yet these never include either valiant causes or any kinds of victories.