Weekend Knights : Students and Businessmen Turn Into Titans in Bloodless Battles

Curses and dust and the sharp clatter of swords rise from the thick of the battle in Thousand Oaks.

War is heck in Wildwood Park this Friday evening, as it is at nearly every workweek’s end, with full permission from the police and park authorities.

Fierce young men ages 14 to 30 slash relentlessly at “enemies” who huddle inside the park’s stout wooden fort behind bamboo swords, plywood shields and 8-foot pikes of plastic tubing padded with duct tape.

Bravado rules the mock battles--medieval-style bouts that have been played out on a weekly basis by a group of Thousand Oaks amateur swashbucklers for the last 14 years.

Fighters fling insults and swear at each other between blows. Crippled by leg “wounds” and “injured” arms that hang useless at their sides, they laugh and sneer to mask their panic.

And the last man alive in the fort always “dies” valiantly, his bamboo blade flashing around him to beat back enemies closing in for the kill.

Slain and sweating, Dan Brethauer flops on the grass to watch the rest of his fellow soldiers fall one by one.

“Boy, that was short and bloody,” the clothing salesman says after the 90-second battle, ripping off his pirate-style bandanna to run thick fingers through dense, reddish hair.

At 24, Brethauer has been battling buddies with bamboo shinai --practice swords used in martial arts--for about six years worth of Friday nights.

Like his brethren, he is sworn to keep drugs and drink off the battlefield, and to follow the informal rules of combat:

Fighters struck on the arms and legs must stop using them.

Three wounded limbs mean death, and those hit in the back or chest must also fall down “dead.”

Blows to the groin and head are forbidden. But beyond that, all’s fair in war.

And like many of the other warriors, Brethauer has honed his swordsmanship to swift, athletic tautness that could shame even some Hollywood stuntmen.

“I’ll need a warm-up,” Brethauer says with a sigh. “Those last two battles sucked.” Then he stands and whips his twin shinai into a blur around him, crossing swords with fellow “corpse” David Vasquez, a 22-year-old cashier, until it is time for the next battle.

At 30, Tom Warner has been fighting the longest, since that night in 1980 when he and some friends launched the weekly tradition.

“A bunch of us were sitting in a friend’s yard, and we decided it’d be a cool thing to do,” explains Warner, a tall, stocky Thousand Oaks insurance underwriter, church worker and de facto leader of the motley crew of amateur swashbucklers.

Anyone who wants to fight can, Warner says.

Karen Young, a 15-year-old Newbury Park High School student, is fighting this night for the first time, swiping tentatively at her foes with a variety of borrowed weapons.

“I came down with some of my friends, and I got into it,” she says, hefting a shinai . “It’s fun. I’ll have bruises, but it’s fun.”

The fun takes many forms--for some it is the whirl and clack of parrying blades, for others the boyish camaraderie and testosterone rush of combat.

All the fighters take some glee in battlefield chatter--jokes, insults, war-movie dialogue and Monty Python routines.

Two act out a boot camp scene from Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”:

“Lemme see your war face, son!”

“What’s my war face, sir?”

“This is your war face, son: AAAAAAAAAARRRGGGHHH!”

The weapons are tough and fairly safe.

“The best guideline we have is you can use any weapon that you don’t mind being hit with yourself,” Warner says.

Some customize the popular shinai , adding extra padding at the tip that the rules say can be used to stab as well as slash.

Others fabricate funky medieval weapons.

A short tape-padded pipe can serve as a mace, while a long one is a pike--regarded as a good weapon for beginners or cowards because it can strike from a distance.

A broomstick tipped with clothesline and a ball of tape makes a flail that can rip an opponent’s sword from his hand.

Forbidden is the dreaded carpet flail--three linked rolls of heavy carpet with an unstoppable 8-foot reach that someone used one night with a roundhouse swing to clobber every one of his enemies.

Then there was the 4-year-old who showed up one day with an older brother and a tiny pike--one end tipped with fuzz--threatening, “First I tickle you, then I KILL you.”

Paul Valera, a 22-year-old teacher-in-training, hefts a meaty battle-ax he has fashioned from plastic pipe and black foam pipe insulation.

“I likes to HIT THINGS,” he says, an evil gleam in his eye. “I’ve always had a really destructive attitude.”

Friends watch from a distance.

“It’s kind of bizarre,” says Janel Schnieder, 18, watching a male friend caper around the ramparts with a fake sword. “It’s like a bunch of young boys reverting back to their childhood.”

“It’s interesting,” admits her friend, Amy Stillman, 17 with detached cool. “You don’t normally see these people walking around hitting each other.

“It’d be better,” she says, sniffing at the combatants’ jeans, T-shirts and combat boots, “if they dressed up.”

Yet it is easy to see the attraction that has kept some weekend warriors coming back to the never-ending battle of Wildwood Fort for four, five, even 10, years.

The swordplay is a brutal, yet often elegant, sport that offers the thrill of combat without the threat of serious injury.

The shinai sting and bruise, but they do not cut. The only serious injuries in 14 years have been a broken leg or arm here or there when a fighter failed to watch his step.

“You get the occasional eye poke,” 17-year-old Brian Gantzer says offhandedly of combat, which everyone understands is done at their own risk. “It hurts real bad, but it goes away. No one’s sued anybody, because we’re not organized. We’re just out here to have fun.”

There is an added bonus, says Gantzer, who was drawn into sword fighting by his sister’s longtime boyfriend, founding fighter Tom Warner.

“Tom’s kept me basically drug free and party free--and I’ve been invited to many keg parties,” says Gantzer.

Brethauer adds, “We keep people who DO drugs and alcohol in the fort away.”

Some summer nights, the battles go on until 10 p.m.

They often start the same way: Teams of four or five warriors face off nearly motionless at the fort’s 8-foot-high gate, trying to psych each other out before the first blows dissolve into chaotic brawling.

And they end the same way: When the last man dies.

In the fourth battle, Brian Gantzer is the last man.

Routed by invaders, he limps from fort to field on a wounded leg, his shield and shinai in hand and three howling swordsmen at his heels.

One hacks his good leg from beneath him. Gantzer goes down behind the shield, swinging wildly at the thicket of blades.

As they force him onto his back, Gantzer slashes out desperately, but Valera delivers the death blow, smashing his ax down onto the teen-ager’s heaving chest.

Gantzer lies there for a minute in pain, having wrenched his arm in the skirmish.

Then he is up and trudging over the ramparts for the next battle.