EXT. BATTLEFIELD, JENKINS' FERRY, ARKANSAS - DAY

Heavy grey skies hang over a flooded field, the water two feet deep. Cannons and carts, half-submerged and tilted, their wheels trapped in the mud below the surface, are still yoked to dead and dying horses and oxen.

A terrible battle is taking place; two infantry companies,Negro Union soldiers and white Confederate soldiers, knee-deep in the water, staggering because of the mud beneath, fight each other hand-to-hand, with rifles, bayonets, pistols, knives and fists. There's no discipline or strategy, nothing depersonalized: it's mayhem and each side intensely hates the other. Both have resolved to take no prisoners.

  HAROLD GREEN (V.O.)

Some of us was in the Second Kansas Colored. We fought the rebs at Jenkins' Ferry last April, just after they'd killed every Negro soldier they captured at Poison Springs.