"Until Sundown" by Don Troiani

Honors for Lieutenant General Steve Kitchen

Officers of the Confederate States of America (CSA) Armies & Fellow Club Members,

I am immensely pleased to gather everyone, again, here today to celebrate an officer of the Confederate States of America (CSA) Armies who has served with unwavering dedication to the CSA and the command positions he has held. Lieutenant General Steve Kitchen has served the CSA & in particular the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) as one of it's primary and longest serving administrators to date.

Steve has been in the Club since 2004. He has served all of his time in the ANV. In January of 2009 Steve became the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) Chief of Staff a position he still holds to this day, making him the CSA officer who has held the same command continuously, beating out General Nick Kunz who has served as the Commandant of the Vicksburg Military Institute (VMI) since November 2010.

Steve also served as the Corps Commander (CC) of the II (Jackson's) Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) from 2009 to 2015. Prior to both these commands Steve served his early years in the I (Longstreeet's) Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV).

Like General Nick Kunz, much of Steve's work has been behind the scenes & not directly front and center in the public eye of the Club. He has managed the Army of Northern Virginia's (ANV) website for a very longtime now. He also organized, manages & updates the extensive and very helpful ANV Officer Records Charts that tracks a whole host of data on current and former ANV officers. It is the only chart of it's kind currently used in the CSA and has been in Steve's trusted hands for a very long time. Steve also meticulously maintains Officer Battle Dossier's (OBD) on every ANV officer, a feature that you can click on by any officer's name on the ANV website.

Steve has spent the majority of his time as Chief of Staff serving under General Stewart Stiles, ANV CO. Steve is only the 3rd person to be the ANV CoS.

I have had the privilege of working with Steve in others clubs over the years, mainly a now defunct Napoleonics one. He worked equal with me as a webmaster for that entire club. I enjoyed running that club with him & had long admired his very good webmastering skills & the charts he kept there too. We didn't have an automated system for the almost 10 years that club was around, instead it was all done "long handed", like here in the old days! Steve managed our game forms and the scoring of them for almost all of those years. He also built large sets of graphics & images for that club.

He was always precise & consistent and often caught my own mistakes in the admin work we did together. So it is very fair to say that I was not surprised when he brought those skills here when he took over the as the ANV's Chief of Staff......in fact I was delighted! The ANV would be and has been well looked after since. You always knew what you'd get from Steve & that unwavering quality of work was exactly what the ANV needed then & since to be the functional force it is today. Through every up & down the CSA had, he was there staying just outside the main War Department Offices doing his work. The ANV has it's records intact the longest because of this. Steve even made such quick work of adding in the former Army of Georgia's (AoG) records into the ANV Charts that General Stiles was very thankful and told me Steve was a miracle and he needed to be rewarded for such. I was already planning it & I am more than glad to do so today, finally!

For all these reasons, when making some changes to the Eastern Theater website, where I list out the top level commanders of the ANV, I added in a photo of Walter H. Taylor to represent Steve on the page. Almost all of us are aware of Taylor being Lee's most trusted & competent aide, so it was a natural fit. (It might be also, like Taylor in the post War debates, Steve has been a little bit of a "court of last resorts" on issues in a few of the clubs. )

Steve also is a big fan of trains & the ANV website address uses his love of trains in it (http://lner2868.co.uk/anv_hq/index.php), I'll clue you in like he did for me, check this site out: http://www.railalbum.co.uk/steam-locomo ... -b17-1.htm

It gives me true pride to award Steve the following for his irreproachable service.



Thank you Steve from ALL of us!

Three Cheers for Lieutenant General Kitchen!

Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

In Steve's Honor I have once again asked Fightin' General Gary Schofield to have the ol' 2nd South Carolina String Band play us a tune. I have asked them to play The White Cockade & Devil's Dream in Steve's Honor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v20YunOyaXw

(Probably slightly absurd, as I am sure Steve is not a Jacobite, but blue cockades were used by supporters of southern secession prior to the Civil War & were used in 1780 by those in the Gordon Riots in the UK. A white cockade was used by the Scottish Jacobites in their uprising against the British Crown, which had French backing. The white cockade was used by the French Ancien Régime & the Americans employed it into their cockades to symbolize the Franco-American Alliance in the Revolution. Steve, being a professed Yorkshireman (a people with a strong sense of regional identity), his people were on the losing end of the Wars of the Roses. The supporters of the House of York, using a white rose as their symbol. The Scottish Jacobites used the White Rose of York too, to honor the House of York against the crown. The current flag of Yorkshire has the White Rose of York set on a blue background! A long rambling semi-connection, but Ta da! I also like the song a lot, so you do the math next time! )

The buffet of food & more importantly drinks is open!