Jenny Thompson

“Those Guys Need Therapy": The Hobby of War Reenacting


In an episode of the NBC television drama ER, a middle-aged “general” decked out in a Union Army uniform is rushed in for treatment of a battlefield injury. More anxious about missing the reenactment of the battle of Malvern Hill than he is about his injured toe, he tells the doctor, “Just saw it off and throw it in a basket. I’ve got to get back to the field.” When told that amputation is unnecessary, he appears disappointed. Next, he requests ether to dull the pain. “We haven’t used ether as an anesthetic for over forty years,” the doctor replies, rolling his eyes. The general responds, “Just give me a bullet to bite on.” The scene ends with the reenactor, bullet between his teeth, grimacing in pain.

From Jessica Yu’s 1996 documentary about American Civil War reenactors, Men of Reenaction, to the 2003 feature film, The Battle of Shaker Heights, the media have been drawn to a phenomenon that seems to have emerged out of nowhere: war reenacting. Reenacting itself is not new. Historically, the US military has reenacted past battles to train soldiers, and war reenactments have long been part of commemorative ceremonies. As early as 1822, twenty American Revolutionary War veterans engaged in a reenactment of their 1775 clash with British troops at Lexington; and in 1902, Crow Indians and state militiamen reenacted “Custer’s Last Stand” near Sheridan, Wyoming. But what reenactors themselves simply refer to as “the hobby” has grown into a popular leisure activity in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan in the last two decades.

By now, most people have at least heard of the hobby by virtue of its largest and most public segment: American Civil War reenacting. Throughout the United States, crowds of spectators venture to various sites to watch Civil War battles re-created by reenactors. Some of the largest of these battles involve tens of thousands of reenactors charging across fields, firing artillery, and even riding on horseback. But what many people have yet to hear about is the hobby’s lesser-known branch: the twentieth-century-war reenacting hobby. With a far lower profile than the Civil War hobby, this branch of reenacting involves men and some women who regularly dress up like more modern soldiers and gather together to re-create the combat of World War I, World War II and, more recently, the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Twentieth-century war reenacting is far smaller in membership than the Civil War hobby, which boasts tens of thousands of members in the United States. By my own estimate, based in part on the educated guesses of participants, there are roughly six thousand twentieth-century war reenactors who belong to established war reenacting units across the United States. With their stated goal of honoring history’s real soldiers and creating an “authentic” war experience for themselves, twentieth-century war reenactors portray not only American soldiers, but also German, Australian, Russian, Scottish, Japanese, Canadian, French, British, and Vietnamese troops, for example. Throughout the year, they conduct private weekend-long reenactments, known to them as “private events,” which are neither advertised nor open to the general public.

In California, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma, for example, World War I reenactments are attended by hundreds of reenactors who join their established units in the field for these weekend-long events. And, on a remote site in Pennsylvania, the largest group of World War I reenactors in the US meets twice a year. Meticulously “kitted out” in period uniforms, they spend the weekend in an intricate network of trenches, firing rifles and machine guns, conducting raids, launching mortar, grenade, and gas attacks, and “killing” each other as well as “dying” themselves (usually several times in a given event). When not in combat, they sit in the bunkers they have constructed or in period camps, eating hardtack, singing songs, and talking about their (real) lives.

Many of these same reenactors also participate in World War II reenactments, which are hosted across the country by reenactors themselves on privately owned sites, as well as in state parks and on federal military installations. World War II events range in size from a dozen to well over fifteen hundred reenactors and also involve “tactical battles” that employ period firearms, jeeps, and even tanks.

Korean War events, far more recently having taken off, are generally small; they include public displays and tactical reenactments of historical events such as General Douglas MacArthur’s landing of American and Allied forces at Inchon. Vietnam events also include public displays of uniforms and equipment as well as privately reenacted patrol missions where American grunts search for Vietcong reenactors.

Being a member of the twentieth-century war reenacting hobby involves much more than putting on a period uniform and doing an “impression,” the word reenactors use to describe a portrayal of a particular soldier. Nearly half of these reenactors claim reenacting to be their primary leisure activity, and, along with participation in their private events, nearly all engage in a wide variety of other hobby-related activities, often spending large amounts of time, effort, and money on them. They collect and restore firearms, equipment, and uniforms, known collectively as “militaria”; they conduct historical research; they reproduce period uniforms; they craft replicas of period leather and paper goods; they restore original military vehicles and aircraft; they tour battlefields; they interview veterans of the wars they reenact; and some even parachute out of planes in order to authenticate their airborne impressions.

Although some reenactors are quite guarded about their involvement in the hobby, the hobby also has what one reenactor calls its “public face.” Citing a need to instruct people about the wars they reenact and to commemorate the sacrifices of veterans, most reenactors also participate in what they refer to as “public events,” such as mock battles, parades, and commemoration ceremonies. At schools, museums, historical sites, and conventions, they set up living history displays of their militaria collections and serve as history instructors to the public at large.

Whenever reenactors move into the public spotlight, they are well aware of the criticism and even outrage they can evoke, especially in response to their portrayal of Nazis, their use and display of weapons, and their apparent desire to re-create wars whose memories are still painful and survivors plentiful. After a century marked by multiple wars in which tens of millions of people were killed, injured, or emotionally scarred, the use of war as a personal pastime strikes many as distasteful at best. Spending one’s leisure time waging mock combat, firing a gun, wearing a uniform, and playing war can surely be seen as a bizarre if not wholly disturbing pastime. After all, according to the view of many outsiders to the hobby, only a child or warmonger would want to pretend to be a soldier. But reenactors are the first to acknowledge that, unlike, say, golf or ceramics, their hobby places them within the realm of a potentially heated debate over the question of whether reenacting is a proper way to represent war.

Such a debate is not new, of course. Efforts to express collective war memories--from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibit--often stir controversy. “Americans,” historian G. Kurt Piehler observes, “remain troubled and divided over the most appropriate way to remember and commemorate the past.” Writer and Vietnam veteran Tobias Wolff acknowledges the particluarly difficult task of representing war. “How do you tell such a terrible story?” he asks. “As soon as you open your mouth you have problems, problems of recollection, problems of tone, ethical problems.” Such problems are central to the question of how the troubling memories of war should be represented. And it is this question that determines many outsiders’ less than enthusiastic responses to the hobby.

After I presented a paper on reenacting at an American Studies Association conference, one of my panel members identified himself as a veteran and commented: “Those guys need therapy.” (Laughter from the audience.) “If they want to know what it’s like to be a real soldier, I’ll show them.” Like many outsiders to the hobby, this veteran based his opposition to reenacting on the fact that reenactors are not soldiers, and therefore deserve little more than dismissal as observers note their obvious, even laughable failure to reach their purported goal: to re-create war authentically. They’re not soldiers. They’re not really in a war. They can’t know what it was like. Those who find reenacting to be weird, sick, or, as the ER episode asked viewers to believe, mildly crazy, find their reactions affirmed by most serious assessments.

Ironically, at a time when many bemoan Americans’ “ignorance” of history, some critics simply oppose the efforts of laypeople to take history into their own hands through their hobby. Assuming that the primary goal of reenacting is to re-create war authentically, critics argue that reenactors might get some of the details of war right, but they leave war’s larger truths behind--its complex historical and social implications--and do nothing more than trivialize it. Cultural critic Kevin Walsh, for example, argues that reenactments “are nothing but mere titillation, meaningless amateur dramatics promoting the post-modern simulacrum, a hazy image of a manipulated and trivialized past.” Former National Park Service official Dwight F. Rettie remarks, “battle reenactments are by their nature an inaccurate portrayal of a dirty, deadly, bloody event. [They] trivialize the horror and reality of war and, for young people and children in particular, they convey a false impression of war’s terrible effects.”

Reenactors are well aware of such criticism. Some even agree with one charge. “We do somewhat trivialize [war],” one reenactor admits, “because you don’t have the real pain” and “you don’t have bullets whizzing by you.” But almost universally, they dismiss the other charges as stemming from “public ignorance” or “academic arrogance.” “I can understand the resentment of historians,” one longtime reenactor concedes. “They see any interpretation other than their own as heresy.” Another reenactor insists that everyone--not just historians--should be able to interpret history. He says that it’s “narrow minded” for scholars to believe that “we’re the professional academics so we’re the only ones who can speculate on this sort of stuff.” Ultimately, he says, they “write their books and they don’t know either.”

In fact, as much as reenactors are criticized, they are also critics themselves. With very clear positions concerning the ways the American public, the academy, and the media understand and represent war, they, too, react to what they perceive to be the public state of history. And at the heart of their hobby lies their belief that history is not the privileged sanction of the elite, the professional, or the intellectual. To them, history is not a hallowed realm to be guarded in museums, copyrighted by an industry, or sold back to the public in a sleek package. And they scoff at the idea that they must hold academic credentials or professional positions in order to represent war.

Thus, when scholar Jay Anderson argues that a living history practice such as reenacting “lies outside the boundary of established academic and public history [and] thrives on independence,” he is, to a certain extent, correct. Reenacting is a voluntary hobby that functions largely beyond the realm of professional institutions that are culturally sanctioned to represent war, such as the academy, the book industry, and Hollywood. In this sense, the hobby is a thoroughly grass-roots enterprise, operating largely without sanction from any official body. In this way, reenactors are part of a larger phenomenon of people using history to claim power over the stories of the past. Like other hobbies, such as researching family genealogies, reenacting is a way to make active and personal use of history. History, and particularly the history of war, provides reenactors with a rich terrain of human stories that both inspire and challenge them. And, for a variety of reasons, they wish to make use of that history for themselves.

Reenactors thus engage in a series of processes through which they both interpret and represent the past themselves. They consume popular and academic representations of war, evaluate historical evidence, debate the merits of sources, and challenge one another to authenticate their impressions. In doing so, they not only celebrate their autonomy to represent war, but they also extol the value of a pastime that separates them from the mainstream. The hobby, they argue, furnishes them with a way to escape the constraints and shortcomings of what they refer to as the “real world.”

But at the same time, despite their celebration of autonomy, reenactors are bound by the larger social and cultural conventions of the everyday world and must respond to the very same institutions--the schools, the media--that produce the culture’s official representations of war in order to determine the shape of their own. Just as history is often bitterly contested in the public sphere, so, too, is the hobby rife with bitter arguments derived from disagreements over issues of interpretation. As academics argue the merits of a particular interpretation in journals or at conferences, reenactors argue about history at events and over the Internet. From larger questions concerning, for example, a soldier’s political identity to questions about war’s minutiae--What color were the belts American soldiers wore in Vietnam?-- reenactors endlessly debate the nature of their representation.

In this sense, the hobby is factionalized over a central question that plagues even the official, public realm of the past: Who has the right to claim authentic ownership of history? As reenactors struggle to answer to this question, they expose the contemporary nature of a hobby that at first glance seems to be concerned solely with history. Ultimately, they reveal how reenacting is as much about the present as it is concerned with the past.

In fact, the assumption that reenactors are focused only on achieving authenticity in order to “relive” history is incorrect. Their emphasis on achieving authenticity in representing war does not stem from a desire to replicate the past. While authenticity is a critical, central issue for reenactors, achieving it is not viewed as a means to time travel. Instead, as I hope to show, reenactors use the hobby in general and focus on the issue of authenticity in particular in order to cope with the real-life issues that reflect the broader culture in which they live. However much it masks its relation to the present through elaborate rituals, costumes, and props, reenacting is both a product of and a response to the very society from which it emerged.



Copyright by Jenny Thompson.