War: What Is It Good For?

Here’s a piece I initially wrote in 2001, after tagging along with a friend who was covering a Revolutionary War re-enactment for the local paper.  I wrote my own article for a zine I created later that year called PinkEye.

I arrived at the scene of the battle before a single weapon had been drawn.  The cannons were still stowed, the horses still chilling in the shade of the Maple trees.  The wind was fresh, and the fields were clean.  But the soldiers were everywhere.

I let my public school education out without a leash, and began talking with the people around me, all grown men wearing costumes and getting ready to kill a weekend playing war.

The first group I saw wore battered red jackets and carried musket sidearms.  I remembered my teachers repeatedly droning on, calling the British “redcoats”, and suspected I’d just come face to face with the enemy.  They were eating lunch.

“Are you guys the British?”  I blurted out.  The one nearest me, a mid-50’s white man with the look of a burnt-out high school chemistry teacher, quickly pantomimed an effort to draw his weapon, obviously disappointed in me.  Very likely a teacher after all, then.

War can be so sexy.

“We are most certainly not,” a chum of his said, in between mouthfuls of pork.  “We are the First Virginia Regiment.”

“Americans?”  I asked.  “I thought only the British wore red coats?”

“Oh, no.  The American troops wore uniform colors dependent upon where they were from, and sometimes wore uniforms taken from dead British troops.”

Something clicked in my brain as I heard this, an awareness that history really was coming alive around me in this field in the suburbs.  These men around me were as knowledge-obsessed with the American Revolution as my motley assortment of friends were with punk music, cult films, or roleplaying games.  I have friends who are undeniable experts in their little corner of knowledge.  So it was, I discovered, with these chaps and this particular war.

The opportunity to learn occurred to me, and I decided to ask every question, no matter how inane, that came into my head.

“What are you guys eating?”

“Pork and bread.  Cooked here on the field.”

“Is that authentic Grey Poupon?”

“Yeah, we should probably hide that.”

“What are you drinking?”

“Water,” he said, then took a soldierly swig.  “With some gunpowder in it.”

Wow.  The manliness of it all appealed to me.  I should be out here, wearing heavy woolen costumes, drinking gunpowder and taking big bites out of something I’d recently killed, while knowing I may very well be dead in the next few hours.  They were preparing for a battle, weren’t they?

Something else occurred to me.  “Where are the British troops?”  He pointed off toward more fields.  I said thank you, and moved on.

Patriots call upon a distorted history of the American Revolution.  I already knew that America’s favorite patriot, George Washington, was a pot-growing hippie who refused to pay his taxes, and his partner-in-crime, Thomas Jefferson, was a slave-owner and rapist.  These are the people upon whom this country’s fervent patriotism is built.  And his followers were here en masse to pretend to be his troops.

But what kind of man came out here and pretended to be a British soldier, intent on slaughtering as many ill-mannered yankees as he possibly could?  I had to meet these people.

I trekked on, through various fields, encountering other American troops, before finally stumbling through a tree line into the British camp.  Here, in sharp contrast to the casual atmosphere at the American encampments, troops stayed in full battle uniform at all times.  Soldiers were marching here and there in perfect formation, practicing for those kill lines I’d always heard about.  I walked up to a few gents standing around in the center of the field.  They were the only three not marching about.

“Hey guys,” I invaded.  “You British?”

“Yes, we are,” said a man decidedly lacking a British accent, which killed my principal rationale for why these people chose the side they did.

“Can I ask you a question?  Why be British?  Why be the guys who come here to kill Americans?”

“You’ve asked the right people.  We’re the field generals in charge of this army.  And to answer your question, 95% of the British re-enactors are American veterans.”

Really?  So this army gathered here to pretend to destroy America is mostly made up of people who used to fight for America?  How does this happen?

“They like the discipline, the regimentation of it.  The British were a far more organized military than the Americans.”

They shooed me away, then, leaving me to my thoughts as they prepared to go off and slaughter the rebel yanks.

I considered the other things I’d learned today.  Several soldiers had referred to the war as “Britain’s Vietnam”.  Too expensive, too far away.  Some hinted that England went at the whole thing half-heartedly, knowing they would lose, but demonstrating force to keep their more lucrative colonies in the far east in line.  The American Indian troops said they fought with the British because, unlike the Americans, the British always upheld the treaties they made.  It made me realize that, if the British had won, the American Indian culture would never had died out, and would today be as vibrant as the native culture in India, another of Britain’s colonies.  Think of that.  One less genocide in history, if only they’d put up a better fight.

The battle commenced, cannons firing empty pockets of air at pretend enemies, and I waited for simulated carnage to ensue, with history rattling around my brain.