Alex Gabbard

Devil Bullet Alex Gabbard

A true story. Among the first shots of the ferocious Civil War battle along northern Georgia's Chickamauga Creek valley, a casualty was produced who is the focus of this book. Pvt. Squire Combs of the 8th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry, Company D, left his home in Owsley County, Kentucky on the 24th day of September, 1861 to fight the growing threat of Confederate raiders. The following two years of disease and death constantly around him, he survived to face the Confederate army, then became one of the first casualties of that battle when shot through the head. Left for dead and trampled by hordes of Confederate soldiers, a burial detail that night found Pvt. Combs was alive. Blind thereafter, his life and beyond is this story that began three years after the war when a sympathetic neighbor girl twelve years younger chose to become his wife. Six children born to them brought this story into the following century through their last daughter, Isabelle, who was the grandmother of the author.