Reenactment of War Is Far Too Civil

Something was wrong, and it took me awhile to figure out what.

Civil War buffs recently re-created the 1863 battle of Chickamauga at Fresno’s Kearney Park. The participants all wore clothing authentic to the period, and camps had been set up so visitors could see how troops lived in the field. The highlight of the day was a battle in which opposing soldiers fired blank charges at each other.

I spent some time walking through the camps. The soldiers’ uniforms looked good, the weapons were right. Men in the artillery unit had artillery sabers, and cavalry troops carried a Sharps carbine under their arms hooked to a leather shoulder sling. There was one man in a Confederate officers’ uniform who had what looked like a LeMat revolver in his holster. Good stuff, all of it. Still, something was off, and it was hard to put a finger on just what it was.

Actors playing historic figures stood under a large tent and fielded questions from an audience made up mostly of teens.

“Why did the North win?” a boy asked “President Lincoln.”

“We won because we had a strong industrial base and the South didn’t,” Lincoln said. “Also, we had a much larger population. All those immigrants from Ireland and Germany settled in the North.

In the Union Army camp, a group of children questioned a soldier as part of a school assignment.

“Do you believe in slavery?” a girl asked.

“No,” the soldier answered, then asked if the children would be at the battle. “I’ll try to be brave for you,” he said, and the girl giggled.

I looked again at this young Union soldier, and I suddenly understood what was wrong. The problem wasn’t with wardrobe or props; it was with the soldiers. This soldier, this young man, wasn’t the warrior he was dressed up to be. For one thing, he was too happy. There was no hardness in his eyes, no sense of impending battle, no fear, no terror. Like the replica carbine he carried, where the lines of the stock didn’t quite match the original, the soldier’s stance, his posture, the way he moved and gestured, was all just a hair off. It was only a game to him. And, of course, that’s really all it was.

And I guess that’s what bothered me. Because warfare isn’t a game, and I don’t think it should be glorified. I think it gives young people the idea that being a soldier is a fun occupation. And in the real world, soldiers are a breed apart. Military historian John Keegan wrote, “Soldiers are not as other men. War must be fought by men whose values and skills are a world apart--a very ancient world.”

The sad truth is that our society usually looks down on soldiers, treats them with scorn until they’re needed. British poet Rudyard Kipling touched on this in his poem “Tommy.”

“Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?

“But it’s ‘Thin red line of ‘eroes’ when the drums begin to roll.”

There were 34,000 casualties at Chickamauga. Now, nearly 140 years after the battle, we make a festival of it. On the Union side, many of those killed were the immigrants the Lincoln actor talked about. Those soldiers, most of them, had joined for the meager pay or had been drafted because they didn’t have the $300 needed to buy their way out. When the realities of army life sank in, many found themselves in a place they didn’t want to be, doing things they didn’t want to do. It couldn’t have been fun. I don’t think we should make it look like fun.

The Civil War buffs did put on a good show. The sham battle had the smoke and noises of the real thing, but without the lead balls and the bloodshed. The whole point of the thing, though, seemed to be aimed toward the battle, and I’m uncomfortable watching men play at shooting and killing one another. It tends to cheapen the sacrifice of the real soldiers.

The day after I saw the Civil War reenactment at the park, the Sacramento Bee ran a front-page article on the battle staged there. The reporter interviewed one of the participants, a government attorney in real life, and ran a color photo of the fighting. A little further down on the same page was another story about soldiers. An article reported the killing of Korean civilians by American GIs during the first month of the Korean War, nearly 50 years ago.

Some are calling for the court martial of those responsible. “It’s pretty simple,” said a West Point law professor. “Soldiers are not allowed to fire on civilians.”

Simple maybe for the professor standing at his podium. Not so simple, though, for the frightened young draftees on the front lines who had been ordered to shoot.

An old man, an ex-GI who had been there, was interviewed for television. From the look on his face it was plain that it tortured him to think of it. “You just got to try to live with it,” he said, “if you can.”

It’s ironic that our educated middle class likes to dress up and play soldier when there’s no danger involved, but when it looks like a real-life soldier may have made a mistake we’re all ready to step on him.

In the Civil War, Union Gen. William T. Sherman brought war home to the South’s civilians when he led a march through Georgia and burned the city of Atlanta. After the war, he was named commanding general of the Army. When Sherman was an old man, he said, “I am tired and sick of war. It’s glory is all moonshine. . . . War is hell.”