Lost causes.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: Up Front - Iraqis defy United States

In his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant wrote that he was sad and depressed as he accepted Robert E. Lee's surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. "I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse."

Grant misunderstood why Confederates fought so fiercely. The causes of the Civil War were many, though without one--the question of slavery--it never would have been waged. But most of the common soldiers who marched with Lee and in the other Southern armies were not slaveholders. It was not ideology but something simpler, primitive even, that drew them into the ranks and kept them there, enduring hardships that are almost impossible to imagine today.

There is a story--perhaps apocryphal, though it has the ring of truth--that sums it up. Late in the war, two Union soldiers stopped to inspect a rebel prisoner. He stood before them barefoot and filthy, what once passed for a uniform now nothing but tattered rags on a body ravished by hunger and disease. "For God's sake, Johnny," one of them asked, "why are you people fighting so hard?"

The warrior scarecrow glanced at him. Perhaps a spark of defiance flickered in the fog of fatigue that enveloped the man like a shroud. "Because you're here," he replied.

This sacrifice was not for an ideology--a cause--but a basic human instinct unique to no nation or race: fighting to the death...