STIRRING ACCOUNT OF MEDALS, MEN OF 'VALOR'

David O. Dodd is a name forgotten now, his memory enshrined only on a tiny and hard-to-find marker hard by a freeway in Little Rock, Ark., and in the name of a rural public elementary school, his identity no doubt a mystery to the teachers and the children and miraculously still undiscovered by the political-correctness police.

But young David, a military telegrapher in Little Rock at the tender age of 17, died at the end of the rope because he wouldn't betray a friend who had given him information about Union troop placements to deliver to Confederate commanders, bequeathing a legend of courage and bravery to a place that--recent events and personalities to the contrary not withstanding--highly prizes displays of courage and bravery at the mouth of invading guns.

Dodd and 41 other heroes of the agrarian South's doomed war against the industrial might of th North have been honored now, more than a century after Appomattox, with the Confederate Medal of Honor. Their stories, shrouded in the mists of history, are recounted here and stir the blood yet.

Gregg S. Clemmer became fascinated with this research after he talked to an elementary school class in Darnestown as a volunteer on History Day and was overwhelmed by their fourth-grade curiosity about events as distant to them as the wars betweens Athens and Sparta.

He began digging, and Valor in Gray is the happy result.

Here is the story of Sam Davis, 21, of Pulaski, Tenn., a rider with Coleman's Scouts, "the boy hero of the Confederacy," who, like Dodd, was caught as a spy, sentenced to be hanged and told that he could go free if he would say where he had collected the forbidden information. Like Dodd, he rode to the gallows seated on his coffin, acknowledging the tears and tribute of his friends and of the federal soldiers assigned to hang him.

These were hard times, and the men of that time recognized it without whimper. When the Union officer assigned to supervise the hanging apologized for this duty as young Sam climbed the steps of the gallows, the condemned man merely said: "It does not hurt me, Captain. I am innocent and I am prepared to die, so do not think hard of it."

This was similar to young Dodd's benediction to his hangman in Little Rock: "If I am to die, let me die like a man."

Most of the men here are heroes of the battlefield: Pvt. Wilson J. Barbee of the 1st Texas, one of the men of Hood's famously gallant Texas Brigade (Robert E. Lee's favorite, which variously included regiments from Arkansas, South Carolina and Georgia), shot three time while trying to take Houck's Ridge on the second day at Gettysburg; Major John Pelham of Alabama, "the gallant Pelham" of Stuart's Horse Artillery, whose heroics at 25 made him the South's beau ideal (when he died, three young women in the neighborhood put on mourning); and 22-year-old Henry King Burgwyn Jr. of the 26th North Carolina, who led his brigade across the wheat field in the abattoir of Gettysburg, falling to his death when shot through both lungs.

Their stories are an indictment of the hideous waste of war but a tribute to manly courage and sacrifice of the sort that has gone out of fashion. Mr. Clemmer's book captures the tone and tint of the times, using the words of the men who were there to tell their stories.

All the medals were awarded posthumously, and not by the Confederate government. That government, like these heroes, was long since dead.

Despite agitation for the awarding of medals of valor that began after the battle at Shiloh Church in 1862, the Confederate Medal of Honor was never authorized. Lee, like certain other senior officers did not think much of the idea of commemorating individual bravery. "We have an army of brave men,: he said, and awarding such medals would "reward a few and leave many, equally brave and equally faithful, unnoticed."

Nevertheless, rolls of honor were drawn up, recognizing courage and sacrifice on 100 fields of battle, but the Confederate government, focusing on survival, never got around to having the medals struck.

Not until 1968, a century after the stillness at Appomattox, was the first Confederate Medal of Honor awarded, by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the oldest organization of male descendants of Confederate soldiers.

Forty-two ghosts in gray have been honored so far, the result of painstaking research, using the stringent standards of the U. S. Medal of Honor as adopted in 1917. (Before 1917, the Medal of Honor was not worth much as a gauge of heroics, having once been awarded to 864 members of a Maine regiment as a reward for merely re-enlisting.)

Capt. Thomas G. Kelley, a Navy veteran who won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam, notes in a forward "the potential pitfall in recounting battlefield exploits...that the concept of war itself will be somehow portrayed as virtuous, glamorous, or admirable. Nothing could be further from the truth." But he also notes how he was struck by how "so many [of these Confederate medalists] accomplished so much at such a young age."

The values they lived by--and died by--"serve as reminders of what our young people can accomplish."
Such exploits are reminders as well of the selflessness of the sacrifice of men and women at war, their courage in the face of death in a cause held dear, the devotion of men for one another, the bravery of men called on to be larger than life and bigger than they ever expected to be.

Lee said it best of the men who for four agonizing years, never failed to hurry toward the sounds of the guns: "There never were such men in an Army before. They will go anywhere, and do anything."

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