"The issue over who were the youngest military figures to have rendered plausible or direct service to the Confederate States Army or to the Union Army has often been broached, and has sporadically been treated in far-flung articles by a variety of freelancers and historians ... my unique vantage point of operating with a full knowledge of details on most of the nation's eldest and last Civil War veterans ... Reb or Yank, of those among our last surviving veterans who some eighty years earlier had been only boys age 15 or well under."--Page xiii-xiv.