This is Arroyo Grande’s Medal of Honor winner, Otis Smith, in a pleasant-looking Californio courtyard at the Sawtelle Home for Disabled Veterans in Los Angeles, about 1915. Smith won his medal for seizing the flag of the 6th Florida at the Battle of Nashville in December 1864.

He would live fifty-nine more years. Like other veterans, he seemed to be semi-migratory, checking in and out of Sawtelle. Cavalryman James Dowell, a member of an important family in the South County, checked himself into the facility twice, in 1903 and 1907, for unknown reasons, but they must have been serious ones, because he was an independent farmer in the Arroyo Grande Valley–the only medical condition listed was one endemic to cavalrymen like him: hemorrhoids. He is listed as “D’Pd” on one discharge, “Own Request” for the second.

Sawtelle looked beautiful. It wasn’t, necessarily. The people who ran the home were twice investigated but twice exonerated for mistreating the pensioners in their care.

A widespread complaint was the food–or, rather, the lack of it. If meat appeared, the veterans knew it was because there was an important visitor.  “I know,” one veteran said in 1909 of other mealtimes, “exactly what we’ll have tonight. Prunes, applesauce, a little bread and tea. About three cents’ worth.” Other problems were more serious: one veteran was found dead off the grounds: he’d wandered away, fallen into a ravine, and broken his neck.

Maltreatment of Civil War veterans, from what I’m learning, seems to have been widespread. Americans lauded them on the Fourth and Decoration Day, and the rest of the year seem to have wanted them to disappear. The sight of legless or armless men was resented; when soldiers came home from the war, thousands went on an kind of mass bender, got into fights, raised hell, and made Americans fearful of them and the resentment of that, too, seemed to stick.

Of course many of them couldn’t leave the alcohol alone: a hard drinker in one veterans’ home had a habit of biting the other pensioners; another got the point where he had to be committed to an asylum, a third lay down on the railroad tracks to die; a bottle of whiskey was found nearby as a kind of abstract suicide note.

You wonder if a place as beautiful as this, even if it’d been run skillfully and compassionately, could ever offset the demons that pursued these soldiers for decades after Appomattox.

Sawtelle was located just west of the 405, near UCLA. It was torn down years ago. You hope its demolition released the battalion of ghosts that must have haunted the place.