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They called them “snatchers”—the men who rode into hell to bring the wounded back alive.

In August 1862, twenty-two-year-old Joshua R. Pettit left his young bride in Cattaraugus County, New York, to join the 154th Regiment as part of the Union Army Ambulance Corps. For the next three years, he would witness some of the Civil War’s bloodiest battles—not as a soldier carrying a rifle, but as one of the brave men who drove ambulances onto smoking battlefields to retrieve the dying and the dead.

From the nightmare of Chancellorsville, where Stonewall Jackson’s surprise attack shattered Union lines, to the hell of Kennesaw Mountain, where he loaded wagon after wagon with mangled bodies, to Sherman’s devastating March to the Sea, Joshua served where the fighting was fiercest. He slept on frozen ground at Lookout Mountain, endured typhoid that nearly killed him, and watched as battle after battle reduced his regiment from nearly 1,000 men to barely 300.

But Joshua’s story is more than a war memoir. It is the account of a man who survived when so many did not, who came home to build a hardware business and raise a family, who carried the weight of survival’s guilt for the rest of his life. Written in Joshua’s own voice, expanded from his Civil War diary and regimental records, The Snatchers offers an unflinching look at the war from a perspective rarely told—the men who saw the true cost of every battle, measured not in tactical victories but in shattered bodies and broken spirits.

This is the story of the ambulance corps, the snatchers who rode between the lines while bullets still flew, who knew every soldier by the weight of his wounds, who brought men back from the edge of death only to watch many of them die anyway.

And it is the story of one man’s journey from the carnage of war back to the life he left behind—if such a return was even possible.

Based on the actual Civil War diary of Joshua R. Pettit, Sergeant, Ambulance Corps, 154th New York Volunteer Infantry, expanded and edited by his descendant Charles R. Pettit.