I don’t know how many times I’ve re-written the ending to Patriot Graves. Today I lucked into a discovery, revealed below, about Arroyo Grande farmer Otis W. Smith, who received the Medal of Honor after the 1864 Battle of Nashville.  So I will try this one out. It will change, too.

The last verified survivor of the Civil War died in 1955, at 109. The passage picks up with his death:

He was the last survivor of a war that, in many ways, has survived his generation and many since. It left battles that still needed to be won and others that still need to be fought for the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln identified in two transcendent minutes at Gettysburg. In January 1941, Medal of Honor winner Otis W. Smith’s grandson, Johnnie, would enter the army to fight for freedom in a new and terrible war. When Hitler joined it, at the end of that year, he did so jubilantly, thinking America decadent and Americans, in his simplistic and twisted Darwinian worldview, a mongrel people. Churchill was said at the time to have been nearly as pleased as the parochial Austrian dictator was because, unlike Hitler, Churchill knew about Grant and Sheridan, knew what the Iron Brigade had done at Gettysburg and he knew Americans—his mother, Jennie, was born in Brooklyn. As Johnnie Otis Smith, a soldier from the other end of the nation, from the Huasna Valley of California, prepared to go to war, Churchill knew with crystalline certainty that the two nations were destined to vindicate their faith. Democratic government would not perish from the earth.