In which our intrepid hero unexpectedly encounters the American Dantooine…
Although I have had a lifelong interest in military history and, indeed, advanced degrees on the subject, military battlefields have never interested me much. I’ve been to a number of Civil War battlefields, for example. and my collective reaction has basically been “meh.” I think the reason is because old battlefields, by the very nature of the warfare of earlier eras, were typically places where there wasn’t much of anything. Given the linear nature of warfare at the time, a typical battlefield might feature defensible terrain near a strategic location—unless, as at Gettysburg, the battle was an encounter battle, in which case the location might not even be significant at all. Again, because of the nature of warfare at the time, the geography of the battlefields is also usually not that interesting. However, military structures can be quite interesting indeed. So when I unexpectedly came across an abandoned military base in northwestern Ohio, I was quite delighted.
