Camp Gordon: WWI Barracks in the Pines

Lyrics

[Intro]
The ground here at Peachtree DeKalb is flat.
Unnaturally flat.
Compacted by the weight of a history they paved over.

[Verse 1]
It started with a piece of paper in Washington.
Signed by the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker.
July, 1917.
He’d never felt this summer heat.
They cleared two thousand acres of Georgia pine.
Sawmills screamed from dawn to dusk.
The air went thick with resin and red clay dust.
For twelve hundred identical buildings, laid out on a perfect grid.
For a war three thousand miles from Chamblee.

[Chorus]
This soil remembers the sound of thirty thousand boots striking as one.
The parade ground holds its breath under the asphalt.
A ghost-platoon of the 82nd, drilling in the heat haze over runway two-one-left.
General John Brown Gordon's namesake camp.

[Verse 2]
They came in September.
From the Appalachian hollows and the Carolina mills.
Boys in new wool, sweating on the trains.
The town was five hundred souls.
Then it was a city.
The nights smelled of coal smoke from a thousand stoves, and wet uniforms on clotheslines between the pines.
The metallic clatter of mess kits at five a.m. reveille.

[Chorus]
This soil remembers the sound of thirty thousand boots striking as one.
The parade ground holds its breath under the asphalt.
A ghost-platoon of the 82nd, drilling in the heat haze over runway two-one-left.
General John Brown Gordon's namesake camp.

[Bridge]
By December 1919, a cold silence.
The barracks emptied out.
The trains ran the other way.
Most buildings torn down for salvage.
But you can still see the bones.
That low earthen ridge along the south edge… the old rifle range berm.
Where the model airplanes circle now on Sundays.
A different war, a smaller scale.
Some of the old hangars still stand, stubborn, holding their breath.

[Outro]
The red clay doesn't forget.
Not a single footstep.
It just holds the weight.