Shiloh was the first thing I ever knew about the Civil War.

My mom went off on a personal vacation when I was about 10 and stopped at the battlefield, returning with a booklet for me and – I think – a little blue cap. I’m not sure that’s where I got the cap (I know it was Union; born in Rhode Island, she’d never have given me a Confederate cap), but I am sure that booklet is where I first read the phrases “Hornet’s Nest” and “The Bloody Pond.” Vivid phrases like that stick with a kid.

But I have to say it was a surprise when I visited the site in 2010 and discovered that not only has the government preserved those landmarks, but it has also preserved the same orientation film that my mom saw in 1966. In fact, the NPS movie about Shiloh was made even 10 years before that.

Let me put this in perspective: It was made the year I was born, and I’m 54 years old with creaky joints and little remaining hair.

I bravely pointed that out at the front desk, and the young ladies were apologetic.
“It’s still a good film though,” one of them said. “It’s pretty accurate.”

But when we sat down with about 50 other folks to watch it, one of those employees walked up to the front and apologized again. “We just don’t have the funds right now to remake it,” she said. “Some of it’s pretty dated.”

Maybe not the facts (though I believe the film left Missouri out of the list of border states), but the production values were definitely old school: Fort Sumter exploding in what looked like a 25-cent Chinese sparkler, Southern soldiers dressed in crisp Hollywood uniforms that probably don’t reflect the catch-all reality, and the worst collection of false beards this side of a Sunday School pageant. You couldn’t tell if they were glued in place or smeared on with Groucho Marx’s leftover greasepaint.

As a cultural artifact it was amusing, but the problem is that people were chuckling instead of paying attention to the story. We came out of the auditorium less in awe of the human disaster played out on the surrounding hills, and more suspicious that we had just left a kind of down-on-its-luck tourist trap.

A drive though the battlefield, at least, puts that feeling to rest. These well-kept sites are stately and respectful, but I don’t know any other way to tell the story. Cannons and monuments are placed at significant positions, but re-enactors are not running around pretending to be one side or the other. You stand at the Hornet’s Nest and realize you cannot imagine the madness of men charging across the open field – not once or twice, but some dozen times. Then you walk to the edge of The Bloody Pond and feel relieved that nature so quickly washes away the carnage that life throws at it.

But it is our inadequate imaginations and the clean sweep of time that makes a good orientation film so important. Gettysburg recently got a new film and huge visitor’s center, and Shiloh – certainly one of the most famous battles in the war – should get updated, as well.

No one should have to stand where Colonel Everett Peabody or General Albert Sidney Johnston fell and have to dismiss from the mind’s eye some cobbled up images in Hollywood hokum. They deserve better, the battlefield deserves better, and so do we as the heirs to their stories.