In the pre-dawn hours of Sept. 17, 1862, a division of Confederate soldiers moved into place just south of a cornfield near where the Hagerstown Pike runs past a white, clapboard church on its way to the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. Northeast of the Confederates, Union Major General Joseph Mansfield was getting his XII Corps into line facing a small forest. The lesson of what happened within the shadows cast by those trees–known in thousands of military histories as simply “the East Wood”–is something the Bush Administration is letting the nation re-discover these days.