I came to Gettysburg in search of something. History? Perhaps.

I have long been a bit of a history nerd, but have never quite felt the connection with it that I probably should. That’s because I’m from Texas, which has its own kind of history that probably seems amazing to outsiders, but is just normal for those of us who grew up there. And I have lived in Las Vegas for some time, and Las Vegas — having been created in the last hundred years — is not exactly steeped in history.

And so I came to Gettysburg looking for something different.

I came looking for scenery, and found plenty of that on my first day here. There are rolling hills and there are tree-covered mountains of a sort, though actual mountains would scoff at you for calling them such.

I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a special place in my heart for old barns that are dilapidated and older than my parents and yet can still faithfully serve a purpose today. There are plenty of them in the areas surrounding Gettysburg, anchoring farms and holding hay.

There are flags hanging in their rafters; some of them are the stars and stripes. Some are Confederate flags.

Both flags can be found in abundance around this town, which I suppose is only fitting. This is the place where 46,286 men were killed, captured or maimed over the course of three short days in 1863. They believed in what they were fighting for and they flew their flags and then they died, most in violent fashion. The only thing that’s left is a massive collection of fields with memorials and rock walls and ghosts and a thriving tourism industry.

A few hundred feet from the spot where Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, there are three cannons. They sit on a ridge of sorts, with the ground below sloping down to a massive field with the greenest grass you ever saw. If you walk to this spot early in the morning, before the morning sun has burned the fog away, you’ll see a vista that will take your breath away.

You’ll see those cannons pointing down at the field, and you’ll see the wispy fog moving around and the grass glistening with dew, and it is not difficult to imagine that fog as the ghosts of the people who believed in something so much that they were willing to fight a battle where death was nearly inevitable.

And though Gettysburg is a big destination for paranormal aficianados — there are too many “ghost tours” to count, and for $80 you can go on a ghost-hunting expedition complete with scientific equipment for sensing undead spirits (and a DVD of your excursion at the end, one which would no doubt show me screaming and then vomiting on myself from fright) — there is nothing frightening about these fields.

Except, perhaps, for the fact that we’re still trying to figure out how to love everybody, regardless of their skin color, 162 years after the bloodiest battle in American history was fought here in an attempt to rectify that issue.

The fog and the fields of Gettysburg that once ran red and now glow bright green are not frightening in the least. They are peaceful in a way that is hard to explain.

As a veteran of the United States’ last excursion into Iraq, I know battlefields. There is no peace on them. They are brutal and unforgiving, and the memories created there stay with you for a lifetime.

The men who marched onto that field did so knowing that many of them would not return home to their loved ones. And yet they kept on marching, because they believed in something bigger than themselves. Most folks who willingly serve in the military are cut from the same cloth, even if they won’t come right out and admit it.

The thing about war is that you’re never really the same after you’ve participated in it. You come home and nothing feels right for awhile, and then eventually you start feeling a bit like your old self. You start laughing more. You smile. But the truth of the matter is that you never really get back to being the person you were before you left. You can become a close approximation, and you can fool even your closest friends and family. But you’re never really yourself, and how could you be?

Sitting on that ridge by the cannons and looking down into that field filled with the ghosts and the dew, I wondered how the ones who survived fared when they arrived back home.

They went to war with their neighbors and either won or lost, and they returned home to try and live something resembling a normal life. But how could they? Though they lived through the battle, they surely left a piece of themselves here in Gettysburg.

They were alive, but they became ghosts.