Students Given a Vivid Lesson on Civil War

They slept year-round in makeshift canvas tents with only a dirty wool blanket to keep warm.

When they took a bullet, a field surgeon stuck a leather strap in their mouths, probed around for bone shards and often hacked off an arm or a leg.

Once or perhaps twice a year, they bathed. They used lice as a form of sport and entertainment, even betting on them in races.

These harsh realities faced daily by Civil War soldiers were part of a history lesson taught to eighth-grade students on Monday at Los Altos Intermediate School in Camarillo.

On a crater-strewn battleground--actually a field of Bermuda grass and dandelions that usually serves as a lunch area--a Confederate Texas cavalryman and a Yankee Union soldier demonstrated how life was lived in the era of the War Between the States.

These two enemies in war, actually Civil War buffs Dave Kanawah, 49, of Garden Grove and Jack Wells, 51, of Westminster, lecture to students at schools across Southern California each spring, adding a dose of life to those long reading assignments in history class.

“We don’t talk about politics. It’s just what the common soldier had to deal with--things that aren’t found in a textbook,” Kanawah, a forklift operator, said.

Looking like a young Buffalo Bill Cody, Kanawah said he and Wells, a barber, began their Civil War lectures about 12 years ago when his sister, a teacher at Sequoia Intermediate School in Newbury Park, invited them to speak, knowing of the pair’s long interest in Civil War history.

“It’s just snowballed since then,” he said. “We really get a charge out of the teaching.”

Two classes of eighth-graders who turned out to watch the demonstration were also charged, particularly when Wells fired a blast from his muzzle-loading rifle, frightening a flock of sea gulls feasting on leftover luncheon debris.

Though students were moved by the accounts of malnourished soldiers on both sides slogging along miles of country roads encumbered by bulky equipment, most found Kanawah’s talk on wartime personal hygiene the scariest part.

“He said you could smell them before you could see them--that’s pretty nasty,” said 14-year-old Matt Holwick. “You kind of feel sorry for the guys.”

After the buzzer sounded, calling the students to sixth period, 13-year-old Justin Maness lingered at the small Civil War encampment, staring at the two soldiers in wonder.

“I didn’t know they got lice,” he said.