I watched the movie "Gettysburg" last night. I'd been trying to track it down at various video stores, and I finally ran across a copy. I wanted to watch it in preparation for the movie, "Gods and Generals".

"Gettysburg" is a long movie, and could have used some judicious editing. The subject is very good, but the movie is just so slow moving. Martin Sheen plays General Robert E. Lee and Tom Berenger plays General Longstreet. The movie shows the famous ill-fated Pickett's charge, and was quite good at showing the decision making process which led to that particular battle. Actually, it wasn't a battle, it was a slaughter.

One of these days, I'd like to go to Gettysburg for the Civil Wargasm or civil war reenanctment that they put on every year. It's probably the kind of thing where you have to make your hotel reservations very far in advance, since it happens on the July 4th weekend.

Pittsburgh has a museum with the largest collection of Andy Warhol paintings, so I could do a combined Gettyburg and Pittsburgh trip. I've been to Pennsylvania before, but I've only ever thought about it as "that long state you have to drive through to get to New York". I've been to Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell, and I had a boyfriend whose grandmother lived there somewhere and we went to visit her once, but that's it.

I'm seriously thinking about buying Shelby Foote's series of books on the Civil War. I really like Shelby Foote, and what he's had to say about the Civil War. For my elf girl stories, I need to understand military strategy so I can write out the battle scenes. I studied a little bit of military history and planning when I wrote my senior thesis in college. My senior thesis was "the effects of Post Traumatic Disorder on Vietnam War Veterans".

I read all of these analyses on how the Vietnam War was not a conventional war, and how the US military was unprepared to fight a guerilla war. I read about US military training techniques at the time, and a history of how wars had been fought in the past.

The research was all very interesting, and I loved it. War is a very fascinating subject. There is so much logic that goes into putting together a military campaign, which is so ironic to me because war is just not a logical thing. War is the most irrational and illogical thing in the world, yet logic governs the fighting of it. Even guerilla warfare has a certain logic to it.

I got into Robert Ludlum's whole "Jason Bourne" series, because the main character was this extremely smart and logical man who put his "smarts" to work for him when he became a violent killer and assasin. I like the dichotomy of a person being that intelligent and at the same time being that violent.