One Pillar Each: Irwin Casey West and Milton Brown West

Yes, I am totally from the sort of family which had one pillar in the Union and one in the Confederacy. All fine horsemen, however.

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My 2nd great-grandfather, Irwin Casey West, was born on 6 July 1819, in Kentucky. His father, Henry Harris West, was born in 1776, the year of the Declaration, and Henry's father, my 4th great-grandfather Elijah West of Worcester County, Maryland, fought in the Revolution. So the war that founded the country was still sitting at the family table. When the country came apart in 1861, Irwin was past forty, a grown man with a family and a settled life, and he went with the Confederacy: the 39th Regiment, Tennessee Mounted Infantry, W. M. Bradford's regiment, carried on the rolls as the 31st Tennessee Infantry.

His son, my great-grandfather Milton Brown West, was born on 1 July 1845, at Henderson, Tennessee, in what is now Chester County. He was sixteen when the war began, and he went the other way. On 4 August 1863, just past his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted as a private in Company F of the 129th Ohio Infantry, for the Union. It was a six-month regiment, and he was mustered out on 5 March 1864. How a boy from West Tennessee wound up enlisting in Ohio, the record doesn't say, and neither does anyone left in the family.

That is what the record gives me: a father and a son, two regiments, two flags. It's enough to see the shape. They call it the war of brother against brother. In my family it was father against son.

Nothing in the dates tells me why. Maybe they fought it out at the table. Maybe they never spoke of it at all. All over Tennessee and the border states, neighbors split the same way, and one county could send men to both armies in the same year. A family didn't have to be broken to be divided. It only had to be made of people who each decided for themselves.

What they shared was the horse. Irwin's regiment rode as mounted infantry, soldiers who traveled on horseback and fought on foot, and family memory holds that they were all fine horsemen. Whatever else divided father and son, they had the saddle, the care of an animal, the long hours on the road. A skill can cross a line that a conviction can't.

Irwin died on 5 January 1867, in Henderson County, Tennessee, less than two years after the surrender. He was forty-seven. Milton lived until 9 June 1900 and died in Mobile, Alabama, long enough to raise a son, William Milton West, born in 1872, my grandfather. The Union son carried my line forward. The Confederate father is in it too. Neither one cancels the other.

To me personally it feels as if the USA has always been at war.

My grandfather did not fight in WW I due to his asthma, and several generations of his family were badly broken after the Rev War and the Civil War. Both my parents and all my uncles were WW II veterans. My maternal uncle was a bomber pilot, shot down over Germany, spent the war in a Stalag, and came home to help write and act in Stalag 17.

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That uncle was Herbert W. Street, born in Alameda, California, on 29 October 1918. He's in Billy Wilder's film of Stalag 17 (1953), though you won't find his name in the credits. After the war he worked as a “plumber” at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. He died in San Ramon, California, on 24 January 2016, at ninety-seven.

I always suspected he was top secret technology. One of his sons has always been in tech, but no one knows for whom or in what.

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The suspicion isn't idle. In those years the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, at Berkeley and at Livermore, did a great deal of classified work, and plenty of the people who worked there couldn't tell their own families what they did. A title like “plumber” says nothing either way.

Both my husband and I have had, and still have, close relatives in top secret government and military work who don't say much.

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This is what my family actually looks like, held up to the light: not one cause, not one verdict, but people who chose, lived with the choice, and left the next generation to make its own.