His men knew him as a fine horseman and courageous fighter, and they followed him regardless of the odds against them.
When hostilities against the Confederates began, Kelly, who had immigrated to New York City from Ireland following the potato famine in 1846, immediately joined the state militia - then the 88th Volunteer Infantry of the Union Army - and went on to distinguish himself at the battles of Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg. As a new recruit, I was assigned the persona of one of the junior regimental commanders, Colonel Patrick Kelly of the famed Irish Brigade. Named after the largest post-war Union veterans’ organization, GAR was organized into brigades, divisions, and corps modeled on the actual order of battle at Gettysburg. The Confederate clans were more popular, but I joined the sole Union clan: the Grand Army of the Republic, or GAR for short. We organized into rival groups called clans. Our medium of study was the 1997 real-time strategy game Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! which distilled the battle into a dozen or so scenarios that we replayed endlessly in infinite combinations.
As the blue light of the monitor bathed my face, I logged on to Mplayer, where I gathered with a few dozen others in order to delve into the deepest mysteries of the long ago Battle of Gettysburg.
Most nights in ninth grade, after the rest of my family was asleep, I snuck into the upstairs game room and turned on the computer, hoping that the loud buzzing and beeping of the dial-up modem wouldn’t wake my parents downstairs.
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