The Glorious Reality of War is not a biography. Rather, it is a fictionalized account of the experiences of Civil War veteran Charles Wesley Rickard based upon his own recollection recorded in a seventeen page letter to his grown daughter in 1925. He was fifteen when he joined as a fifer because: "They said I was too young for a private and would only muster me in as a fifer as the Col.'s son W.W. Byam had already enlisted as a drummer. (I had never seen a fife) but I could use a rifle, and was bound to go as something."

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