The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Tennessee Thunder: A Tale of Two Armies by Daniel F Korn

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Tennessee Thunder: A Tale of Two Armies by Daniel F Korn https://www.amazon.com/Tennessee-Thunder-Tale-Two-Armies/dp/195919786X Everyone has heard of Gettysburg, but for sheer ferocity of fighting, it is tough to match the horrendous stories of what happened in the fight for Tennessee in the battles of Stones River and Chickamauga. This is the story of two very different armies, and their equally different commanders. The Union Army of the Cumberland, led by the charismatic, but excitable William Starke Rosecrans against the Confederate Army of Tennessee, and its hot-tempered and irascible commander; Braxton Bragg. As 1862 ends, and the birth of a new year of the war looms on the horizon, an end to the bloodletting is nowhere in sight. It was a year that had just seen the April horrific fight at Shiloh, the incredible ineptness of McClellan in the Peninsula /Seven Days Campaign, the September bloodbath known as Antietam, and President Lincoln's launch of a huge gamble in the Emancipation Proclamation, all followed by the near disaster for the Union at Fredericksburg. It would be followed by a year that would see death, destruction, and a level of ferocity in warfare on a scale never before seen on the American continent. Of all the major battles of the Civil War, Stones River had the highest percentage of casualties on both sides. Although the battle itself was inconclusive, the Union Army's repulse of two Confederate attacks and the subsequent Confederate withdrawal were a much-needed boost to Union morale after the defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg. It dashed Confederate aspirations for control of Middle Tennessee. Names such as the Dragons Teeth, Slaughter Pen, the Round Forest, and the Orphans Brigade would enter the American lexicon. The battle was very important to Union morale, as evidenced by Abraham Lincoln's letter to General Rosecrans: "You gave us a hard-earned victory, which had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over." The Confederate threat to Kentucky and Middle Tennessee was gone, and Nashville was secure as a major Union supply base for the rest of the war.

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Because you're about to go on a moment. Monster Education Roller Coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. The folks, Voss here from thecrisVos Show.com. A lot of these young one there, and these things that makes official welcome to the big show. As always, Chris Voss show for 16 years and 2,500 episodes have been bringing you some of the most amazing minds, stories, and journeys across the paradigm of the world. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect

the opinions of the host or the Chris Voss show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it's not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today's featured author comes to us from Books to Life Marketing.co.com.uk. With expert publishing to strategic marketing, they help authors reach their audience and maximize their book's success. Today, we're an amazing young man. We're going to get into it with his book called Tennessee Thunder, a tale of two armies, a second book in a series that we'll get into out February 8th,

2023. Daniel F. Corn joins us on the show. We're going to be talking about his book, his insights, and some of the historical things we can learn from him. As a child, Dan Korn, loved to explore the region around his childhood home and has seen so much of the French and Indian War and the War of 1812. This led to a passion for history, especially America's story, and particularly the American Civil War. As an undergraduate student in college, on a college field trip to Civil War battlefields, He experienced the vision, which inspired Dan to take a crack at writing, and Dan followed his passions and aspirations through his academic career as a high and college, high school and college teacher of history, which also inspired and become a revolutionary war and a civil war reenactor. Tennessee Thunder is his second book. Welcome the show. Dan, how are you?

Oh, good. How are you, sir? I am excellent. Glad to have you. Give us dot coms. Where do you want people to find out more about you on the interwebs? They can go on. My website is www.A.R. I'm sorry, A-R-R-Presents.com. That stands for a Yankee Rebel Presents. And that is my website. It's directly attached to, linked to Amazon and several others. They'll see the books on there. They'll see some videos. They'll see photographs of everything. My first one, Dawn's Grey Steel, was actually featured. On the big billboard in Times Square last November. It was up there for a week. And so we just keep trucking along, trying to do our thing here. All right. Sounds good then.

Give us a 30,000 overview. What's in the second book in your series? The book is a sequel to some extent, but it's also a standalone book. It follows two armies. All my writing is about in Tennessee. The Army of the Mississippi, I'm sorry, the Army. Army of the Tennessee and the Army of Tennessee, there are two separate armies. Really?

Yep. One is Confederate. One is a union. The Union named their armies after rivers. The Confederists named their armies after geographic regions. That's why you have the Army of Northern Virginia, for example, and so on, and the Army of the Potomac, which was a Union Army. But these two armies were led by two very, very different personalities for the Union forces. you had William Stark Rose crayons, who was a genius in many ways.

The man was a very skilled inventor. He had come up with different types of inventions involving kerosene. But unfortunately for himself, he had also experienced an explosion, and as a result of that, he wore a beard in order to cover the burn scars on his face. Oh, wow. Yeah, and he also had one of those slight problem. He stuttered. when he got upset, he would start to stutter very, very strongly until the point where he practically sounded like Donald Duck, but he was really smart, very, very good leader, his man adored him, and he was also a converted Catholic.

He had joined the Catholic faith, which was very unusual back then, for a particular in the military. His brother was the bishop of Cincinnati, Ohio. He too was also a convert, and so you've got that's one kind of personality. leading this army. Very, very excitable, nervous, but absolutely brilliant guy. Braxton Bragg, on the other hand, is the Confederate leader, and Braxton Bragg couldn't get along with anybody to save his life practically. Here's a guy that, in the pre-war era, had been the assistant commander of his military post, the quartermaster for that military post, and the commander for the artillery on that post. As the commander, the commander for the artillery on that post, as the commander of the artillery on that post

he gave himself the quartermaster a requisition for supplies for his artillery unit and he turned himself down wow yeah and then he took that rewrote it presented it to himself as the acting commanding officer on the post and turned himself down again

and when his boss showed up when the commander of the post came back and saw all this he just looked at him and said brack You don't think, man, I know who can argue with himself and lose the argument. That is hilarious. That is hilarious. But he had a situation, too, when his mother was pregnant with him, she was attacked, sexually attacked by Free Black, and she killed the man. Wow.

She was charged with murder. But she won her acquittal. She was acquitted. all that. But you can't tell me that all the turmoil that she experienced did not go directly right into him in the womb. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. So he was quite possibly bipolar. We do know that he had some depression issues. And as a result of that, he had a very, very short fuse and a very hard time getting along with his subordinates. So you've got two very different personalities commanding these two armies. Very different. Wow.

You know, what prompted you to get interested in history and study history? As a child, you might recall a television series called The Wonderful World of Disney. Yeah. Okay. And Disney was actually the originator of the mini-series. They would do all these different programs on Davy Crockett, for example, that he would spread out over a course of so many weeks. But in reality, what he was doing was taking a movie and just turning into short segments. Yeah.

One of the ones that he said, and I loved them. I mean, I watched every one of them, you know, constantly, every Sunday night I was parking front of that TV set watching that stuff. And one of the episodes happened to be Johnny Shiloh, the so-called drummer boy of Shiloh, which was a true story. Kevin Cochran portrayed him in the movie, but he was a real person. He was a young man, 10 years old, who ran away to join his hometown regiment and fought alongside them. they cut a gun down to the point where he could actually hold it and handle it and then in the course of the Battle of Chequamaga

he shot a Confederate colonel right off his horse oh wow yeah he spent some time in a POWs as a POWW but he stayed in the military and when he finally retired as a brigadier general he was the longest serving soldier in the entire federal army wow but that was that got me going and I learned to read very young very young my mom was always said I was reading the

cartoons comic trips before I was even in kindergarten and family encouraged my my love of rating and at that time when I was just growing up was when the centennial the Civil War was taking place and of course Bruce Katten's all his his books I read every one of them and I just the more I read of those stuff the more I got into it and the more I got into it and And I eventually realized I wanted to become a teacher. It was a choice between teaching music or teaching history. And I became a history teacher. My music teacher was high school.

I was kind of upset with me about that because he had really, really worked me over to train my voice and to do all of these different things with me. And as he called me his Frankenstein, he said, I took a quiet kid and turned him into a raging state. stage presence, and now he's rewarding me by going off to teach history. I said to him, you never taught me how to play a piano. Oh! Well, couldn't very well do that. But I went to college, and while I was there, one of the courses I took was on the Civil War, which was a summer course, and the professor, a brilliant guy, was a great

storyteller. And the last week of the class, we actually went and toured Civil War battlefields. And this is where things got kind of. of interesting because you know we were at one of them in particular a place called the wilderness which is in virginia which was the first battle between grant and lee and it was a very dry time virginia was experiencing a drought and the woods caught fire while they were fighting the battles and a lot of the soldiers were burned up in the fires oh i'm walking through a particular section and i happen to be by myself at that point and i

know what time it was because there was time, a temperature thing at the local visitor center there at the park, 90 degrees, 11 o'clock in the morning. Not a cloud in the sky. Beautiful day except it was warm. And all a sudden, I'm standing there, T-shirts and shorts,

and it feels like someone had just poured a bucket of ice cold water right down my back. Oh, really? Yeah. There is nobody there. It's just me. Wow. And it's scared me, obviously. And I got caught up with the rest of the group and kind of hung with the group the rest of the day and made sure I told my teachers about it. He kind of laughed it off.

When I got home and told my parents about it, particularly my dad, he insisted that I tell my grandmother about this, his mom, the next time I saw her. So I did at her house. And when I did, I told her a story. She went and pulled out the old family genealogy Bible. No. And proceeded to go through that book in front of me until she found the right page and then showed up. of the book in front of me and stabbed it with her finger and says, is that where you were? And on the page was listed in an ancestor who had joined the American

Federal Army and fought in all these battles as part of the Army of the Potomac. And the last entry is MIA, May 4th through 6, 1864, Battle of the Wilderness. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah.

That is wild, man. Yeah. Talk about being touched from the grave. Yeah. And it just, that was. kind of an inspiration with that, and I had just finished reading Killer Angels, which was Michael Scharrow's book, or I'm sorry, Jeff Scharrow's book, and I was fascinated by the way he wrote it, and I decided to, I wanted to take a crack at this, and that, between the two and

that is one inspired me to start writing in the first place. And out of that eventually, out of that eventually came Dawn's Grey Steel, and then out of that will eventually come Tennessee Thunder. And tell us about Dawn's Great Steel. let's profile that a little bit. That's kind of the first in the series. Dawn's Gray Steel, a novel about Shilow, April 5th through 8th, 19, or I'm sorry, 18, 162.

All of my stories are, each chapter is a different person. Okay? And they go back and forth, back and forth between the two sides. And the two main protagonists in this particular story are Albert Sidney Johnson for the Confederates, and Ulysses S.

for the union. And you've got Sherman in there, William Sherman, Pierre Beauregard, Nathan Bedford Forrest. These are all characters in the story. And one of the things that has been counted on by a number of people is how accurate the story is.

But as I tell people, one of the things about being a reenacter was that I have done these battles as a reenactor. I did Shilil, 150th interview. anniversary one. And the only thing, you know, different from what it would be for a real battle is we don't have the bullets that wasn't by our head. But otherwise, it's the same thing.

You've got those cannons and everything and all that. And it's noisy. It's loud. You know, but the idea is that the grant has been kicking their butt all the way across Tennessee at this point, Fort Donaldson, Fort Henry, and all that. And he's doing really, really well. And it really sticks in Johnson's craw. Because Johnson had basically kicked Grant out of the Army,

out of the pre-war army. Grant had been a paymaster in California, and he was not a drunk, by the way. People always can say, oh, Grant was a drunk. No, he was not. He was a binge drinker. He could go for months and months and months and never touched a drop of alcohol. And then if he drank one drink, he usually drank a whole bottle.

That was a problem. What had happened was that he was the only bachelor I'm sorry, the only married man on his post and the officer's corps, and he missed his family terribly, and when the other guys would go out to carouse and hang out and everything like that, he sat back in his quarters and drank. And he lost a payroll. He lost a payroll. Oh, wow.

As a result of that, he was cashiered. He was given a choice by Johnson, either except a court marshal, in which case you'll probably lose and get, you know, kicked out of the army with a dishonorable discharge. Or you can resign in your post, your commission, and go home. And, of course, Grant took the resignation part. One of the people who helped him to get home was one of his very, very close friends. That was a guy by the name of Pete Longstreet, who turned out to become Robert Lee's right-hand man in the Civil War. But the two of them were very, very close.

In fact, Grant was introduced to his wife by Longstreet when they were both stationed in St. Louis. And by the same thing, Longstreet was Grant's best man for his wedding. So there's all these connections with these guys. And anyway, but when they come to the fight, Johnson is bound and determined, I'm going to get this guy. I'm tired of him making me look like an idiot. I'm going to get him. and he launches this battle plan, which is absolutely not suited for Tennessee.

It's based on Napoleon's battle plane for Waterloo. Oh, wow. Okay? Which, of course, Waterloo, if you've ever got, Flandersfield's wide open meadows and everything. Where they're fighting is the Tennessee River, and there's ravines and creeks and swamps and everything else all over the place, and it's just a mess.

And you have two very unorganized art. armies. They still, neither one of them, were really that well trained. And it's basically a street fight between two rival gangs, so to speak. And each chapter is told by a different person experiencing what is happening in the course of the fighting, in the battle. Oh, wow. Okay. And do you base it on, do you base the characters on any certain thing? They're based on themselves. Do a ton of research. Research, uh, one of things is that people realize that, hey, he's a teacher, and one of the things he does is he knows how to do the research. And I have been all over those battlefields, so I know exactly what happened, where it

happened, and who it happened with. And all I had to do was come up with the dialogue. And knowing the character and how they thought, that was easy, relatively easy for me to do. So each story, each storyline follows that. And we were, we've been pretty, we've been pretty, pretty successful with that. A lot of people have commented on the story that's they can't believe how realistic and accurate you are. And you better have it right when it comes to historians and reenactors because they're going to tear it apart otherwise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even though it's a historical fiction, you know, it can sometimes, they can sometimes be a little off. So let me ask you this.

We talked about some of the different things. Being a, being a writer, has that helped you as a history teacher to inspire students? Do you think it may do better teacher? Absolutely. Absolutely. They, because they know that, for one thing, they've seen the books, and most of them have read them, for whatever reasons. I taught, and actually taught a dedicated Civil War course at the high school level, which we never had any problem filling up. We have waiting lists for kids to get in, to take it. So, yeah, it definitely has made a difference in how I approached the material. that my expectations are quite high with my students

in terms of writing and doing research. They knew that, hey, he's going to know if it's right or if it's wrong. And so I think that helps inspire them to do a better job. One of the things I'm most proud of, we talk about legacies in our business is my legacy is that there are over 50 young men and women who are now teaching history or working in a history-related field who are former students of mine.

And five of them were at my last school. Five young women who are teachers, elementary school, they're not history teachers, but elementary schools, we're all out to say my last school here. I can't think of a better legacy or recommendation than that

as far as that's concerned. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Great endorsement. So you do both the Revolutionary War and civil war reenacting. How are they different? That seems obvious, but in your words, I guess.

Did you hear me on that one? Reenacting, yes. Yeah, the difference between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War reenacting. There's a lot of things that are different. There's a lot of things that are different. You can have exactly the same commands, and they mean entirely different things. something I have to learn. I had to learn, and I had to realize when I started doing Civil War,

reenactments that a specific command meant an entirely different thing with the Civil War as opposed to doing it with the Revolutionary War. Of course, the weapons are similar, but they're not the same. Uniforms are much different. It's much more pageantry with the American Revolution than it is with the Civil War because you've got very, very colorful uniforms in many cases. But it's also, Revolutionary War reenacted is also more fainting. family-oriented. We had in our particular unit four generations that were doing things,

yeah, whereas Civil War is very, very male-oriented, much more. Although there are women, obviously, doing it, but it's definitely much more male-orientated, and it's not quite as relaxed in terms of doing events. So it's also normally larger, but it's interesting. We have a Revolutionary War reenactment that's going to be taking place about an hour's drive from me this weekend. And there'll be four, five, six hundred reenactors

out there portraying redcoats and patriots. Oh, wow. Doing their thing. This weekend. Yep. Yep. Yeah. It'd be really interesting, huh? Yeah, and I used to do that particular event and everything as a redcoat. My son were both.

So, yeah, that was kind of our family. That was our thing. We were both reenactors together. And that was a good father and son activity. Oh, that was going to be a good activity. Now his kids are growing up to watch it. Watch it. We take them to see it and his boys. And we'll see if one of them someday becomes a reenactor or not.

We'll find out. Might be a future in that for the kids and all that good stuff. So this is really interesting. And why do you particularly focus on Tennessee? I mean, it seems obvious, but, you know, I think people want to hear that from your words. The second most number of battles in the war were fought in Tennessee. Oh, really? Everyone hears about Virginia.

Okay, everybody hears about Virginia. Robert E. Lee, Army of Northern Virginia, Army of the Potomac, living. But the second most number of battles was fought in Tennessee. And in reality, the war was won in the West because the Union took control of the rivers in the West. Once they did that, they cut off the commerce. for the south. They can no longer ship into the south from up north or across the river. When they took control of the Mississippi, they cut the Confederacy in half.

It's just a matter of time. How long can they hold out? And that was basically what it was. And the only army who was really having great success up until Gettysburg was the for the south was the Army of Northern Virginia. And after that, after Gettysburg, you know, the road starts going down for them, as far as that's concern. But that's part of the reason why. I always felt that so much attention was being paid to the east and not enough to the quote-unquote west side of the war.

And the more I read about it, then that's where Grant got started. That's where Sherman got started. There were other leaders that were involved out west. So I always felt that the better Union generals were in the West to start the war, and the better Confederate generals were in the East to start the war. And eventually time was going to bring them both, bring them all together, and then we would see what would happen. Oh, that's right.

That's a real important thing to have go down. When you look at all these different things, what are you most proud of as your teacher and your legacy in that regard? I mentioned earlier about the fact that I have a, such a large number of former students who are now teachers and teaching history, that's a, that's important to me. Just, when you see the light ball click on in a kid's eyes, and you realize that they got it. They got it. And they come back later when you don't, when they're not your students anymore.

And I run in these people all the time. And they tell me that the one class that they will always remember is mine. Wow. Yeah, things like, things like that. And they remember who I am. I might not necessarily remember who they are, but they remember who I am. And that's, that means a lot to me.

It's not the money. People are, oh, you get paid. I said, no, the paycheck's not that good. But altering and changing people's lives for the better, teaching them to be good, productive citizens. that's what's been really cool about all of this and seeing it happen with so many of these kids you know that's the great thing about teachers

my mom was a teacher for 20 25 years my sister was a teacher you know the impact you guys have on people's lives you know I I flunked out of high school a lot of classes that I knew I didn't need to take because I only needed like 26 credits out of 52 I'm like I'm not going to take these other classes I was a dumb kid.

My parents were poor. I wasn't going to Harvard. So I knew a Pell Grant was in my future. And so I flunked a lot of classes on purpose because I just, I'm not going to do the work. But I really enjoyed my teachers. And some of those teachers were kind of upset with me, but they didn't realize they had some of the best impact on me in learning from them because of the quality of the teaching they did. And the excitement they gave to the topics, the engagement they gave. You know, they weren't just up there going Bueller, Bueller, Bueller, you know, there were teachers that made the, that, that brought to life the, the, the, the material.

And they made it exciting and interesting and cool. And, you know, they were passionate and they cared. And those are the teachers that I remember, even though I flunked some of their classes, you know, I revered them as, as teachers and people. And so it's a really great beauty. And we need to put more value into teachers. pay them more, too. Let's start less wars and pay more our teachers, you know?

Oh, yeah. One of my favorite lessons, yeah, one of my favorite lessons is we would do the Boston Massacre, and I would bring in all the uniform coats and stuff, tell the kids bring a crazy hat to wear, and we would go outside, and we would

literally recreate the Boston Massacre. Oh, really? There are things that have done. Oh, yeah, and I'd film it and everything, and the kids would get to watch it afterwards and see how silly some things. getting how realistic other things were. And then we would go back in the classroom, and I would throw up two pictures.

One, of course, was Paul Revere's picture. And the other one was drawn by an actual eyewitness. And I handed kids a Venn diagram. I said, okay, compare and contrast to two pictures. And keep in mind what you just saw when you were outside doing this. And that's when they realize, wow, Revere's stuff is really wrong. yeah it's what's done that way on purpose you know because he was trying to elicit on emotional response and I said okay now think about that in comparison to today how often do you see what the media trying to portray certain events totally differently than the way that they actually have occurred okay and what do you call that propaganda and you know they get it and that those are that's the kind of thing that I do in the classroom yeah is a always trying to get them to understand how the past relates to today.

Yeah. Yeah. It's one thing we always say in the Chris Foss show, the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. Thereby, we go round and around. And so learning from history is important because we can help avoid the repeating of it if we're smart and wise. But, you know, we have this problem where we're humans. and so it's kind of an issue. But that's the beauty of history.

We're human, all right. You can learn from what's going on. You can see the mistakes we made, the errors, and technically we should avoid them. But, again, the one thing man can learn from his history is the man never learns from history. And that's part of all I'm put into the books, too, is the idea that these are humans.

These aren't abstracts. These are flesh and blood people who bled, you know, pain, whatever, felt things, and reacted based upon the stuff that happened to them. And that's, that gets the story across even more so because it humanizes the events. They're not just a name anymore. Yeah. It's something that really happened and people get it and they understand it because they can feel it and see it in their mind. Yeah. And as you're, you know, people suffered real loss. People suffered pain agony, death.

You know, some people can look at events and, you know, oh, it's great. We won this war. We fought this battle and we won the battle and stuff. But there's real blood, sweat, and tears. There's real people who die on the battlefield. In Tennessee Thunder, I talk about all the chapters is Ben Holmes. That's Lincoln's brother-in-law.

Oh, really? Wow. And he was killed at Chickamauga. Yeah, Lincoln had offered him a position. in the government prior to the war trying to keep him from going on the Confederate side and they refused and he ended up getting killed at this

battle and his wife his wife who was Mary Lincoln's sister ended up moving into the White House to live with them for a while and it was all this controversy about a Confederate in the White House kind of thing after that

yep can be having that so this is really interesting you know I remember when I was a child around 10 11 or 12. There was a gentleman in my neighborhood in California, SoCal, and he loved studying the Civil War battles. And so he would go to Gettysburg in different places, and he'd collect the bullets. And both the spent ones that actually probably hit somebody or the ones that never, you know, they just landed and they're fully.

And I remember looking at those and he would show them to me because what they would do is when the bullets hit something, they would smash up and they would create a bigger hole coming out the other side. And so he'd be like, he did tell me, you know, imagine that bullet going into a body and then it hits, you know, a bone or something and it mushrooms out. And then it exits out the other side with probably your kidney or something attached to it. And I remember seeing that and having that tactile experience of that bullet, seeing those bullets and being like, wow, this is this is really something.

And, you know, this was, and then I think he told me a story, or I picked up the story somewhere from class about how back in those days, when they would, you know, you got shot in the arm, they just amputate right there in the battlefield. And so he told me a story of a, yeah, yeah. And so there was a guy who, he got his guts blown open and his guts were hanging out. He was holding his guts in. And he looked down and went, oh, they're going to amputate me. right here, I lose, you know, I lose everything down there below that's kind of, you know, fun for a reproduction purposes. And so he went and hid so that he could just die because he didn't want to.

They eventually found him and saved him, and it turns out they didn't have toad him below the thing, but, you know, kind of craziness back then, what you would have to go with. If you, the Civil War stories about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain at Gettysburg later on in the war, he was shot with a bull. in on one side of his body and came out the other side of his body. And they thought he was going to die. In fact, a grand game of a battlefield promotion to a Brigadier General because they thought he was going to die.

But he survived and came back. But one of the things that happened to him was that that was gone. That ability to have reproductive source was gone. But he was alive. And he was able to communicate and work. and he eventually is a general that will accept a surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse. But, yeah, those kinds of stories were, the prosthetic leg was invented during the Civil War, the true prosthetic leg, by a North Carolinian who had lost a leg during the battle, during the war. So, all kinds of stories.

Mary Walker, she's very prominent in my Tennessee Thunder, first female surgeon in the United States military. The battlefield surgeon. Oh. And she served honorably. She is the only woman, you know, the only woman that won the Medal of Honor. Oh, wow. Okay. Now, is that the matter of honor overall or just for that, just for that?

Congressional Medal of Honor. Congressional Medal of Honor. That's when they started it. They started, they started the Congressional Medal of Honor during the American Civil War. And she was, she's still to this day. it's the only woman to ever win it. Wow. Congratulations.

Do they have female nurses in the Civil War, or was it mostly men? We had Dorothy and Dix, who was head of the nursing corps, who started it. They called her the Dragon Lady. And one of her prime subordinates was, you've got her and Clara Barton, who started the Red Cross, but started out as a nurse with Dorothea Dix and was on the battlefield at Entitum, taking care of wounded men and everything at the Battle of Ventino. She had a soldier get shot while she was holding a soldier, nursing soldier, shot and killed right in her arms.

Wow. She was attending to him. Wow. That would be something. She went on to start the Red Cross and also braves. Yeah. Yeah. There are so many stories like that, so many like that.

You were talking about the weapons and everything. It used to be allowed to bring my, as I think. calling my toys to school in as long as I, the kids, the kids could actually hold them as long as I kept my hand on it. And they all comment on how heavy these things are. Yeah. And they said, you carry this around all over the place. They're going, yep, like that. And they go, oh, my God. Crazy, man. Crazy. Yeah, you're talking, you know, it's the weight of a milk gallon. Yeah. I mean, feeling those bullets. Yeah. A lot of fun, though.

A lot of fun. Yeah, feeling those bullets and the guns and stuff, like the muskets and shit, you're just like, wow, okay. You know, all that stuff that goes on. As we go out, give people a final pitch out to pick up your book and find out more from you about all that good stuff. Yeah, like I said, Tennessee Thunder is a second one, which is the one we've been talking about mostly. Don's Graves Steel was the first one. That's about Shiloh. Tennessee Thunder is about the battles of Stones River and Chickamauga.

That's a much bigger book because of that. My website is www. A Yankee Rebel Presents or AYR Presents.com. And you can get, there's links to Amazon. The books are on Amazon. They're also on Barnes & Noble as well. And Dawn's Gray Steel is hopefully going to become a movie. We'll see.

We've completed the script and the director's cut for it. And hopefully things will happen with that. But the time will tell. Time will tell. Oh, time will tell. So we'll look forward to that then. Sounds like an awesome time. Thank you very much for coming to the show.

It's been fun to have you on and relive some of these wonderful memories from my childhood and yours. You're very welcome. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thanks, Your Honest for tuning in. Order up his books, wherever fine books are sold, the latest in the series, Tennessee Thunder, a tale of two armies out February 8th, 2023. Thanks for mine's for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.