Playing Private Ryan

For much of the 1990s,Jenny Thompson worked as a freelance war correspondent. She wasn’t, however, filing stories from Kosovo or Mogadishu. Instead, she was pulling back the curtain on the ultimate off-Broadway theater of war: the mock battles staged by American men and women who spend theirweekends dressing up like soldiers. In her new book,”War Games” (Smithsonian Institution Press,256 pages,$27.50), Ms. Thompson recounts her seven-year tour of duty as a fake journalist embedded with fake troops who staged fake offensives and died fake deaths in a supposed attempt to understand the reality of war.Ms. Thompson’s infatuation with faux-soldiers dates back to a history conference she attended in 1993 in Arlington,Va.There she happened upon a cadre of World War I enthusiasts dressed in full combat drag. For most academics, stumbling upon a group of gun-toting guys in Virginia is like coming across a family of bears while hiking in the Shenandoahs – best to keep your distance and not make any threatening gestures (later, you can brag about it to your friends). But Ms. Thompson was about to start her Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Maryland, and to her the re-enactors looked less like a clan of shady militants and more like a possible dissertation topic.Ms. Thompson went native in winter 1993.With the help of a seasoned re-enactor, she put together her first costume: that of an American Red Cross Motor Corps driver. Decked out it jodhpurs, boots, a tunic, and cap, she was ready for her first battle, a private World War I re-enactment staged at a Boy Scout Camp in Farmington, Penn. Over the next few years, Ms.Thompson (who later switched her impression to that of a war correspondent) tagged along with a group of World War II reenactors imitating the US 4th Armored Unit. Together they rode roughshod in their armored vehicles at one Battle of the Bulge re-enactment after another all over the Mid-Atlantic region.Along the way, Ms.Thompson discovered that, despite all their trappings of masculinity, war re-enactors are nothing if not a catty pack of clothes hounds. Their lofty mission to portray authentically the experiences of “the common soldier” often boils down to sartorial debates over, say, the proper size of the buttons on an infantryman’s uniform. Even the trigger-shy Ms. Thompson can’t avoid some friendly fire: “As they talked about their clothing and accessories, the reenactors almost exemplified, I hate to say it, the stereotype of women,” she writes.Re-enactors also frequently complain about so-called “farbs.”The prototypical farb is a subspecies of the modern re-enactor typified by a crummy costume, a flimsy appreciation of military history, and a penchant for having period-incorrect pizza delivered to the battlefield. Nobody is more detestable to a re-enactor than a farb – except, perhaps, people who play paintball.When they’re not swapping fashion advice, re-enactors do stage combat events. But despite the title of the book, war re-enactment is not much of a game. There are no winners and losers; strategy is minimal. The battles involve guys running pell-mell through the woods shooting blanks at each other and faking their own deaths (universally signified by removing one’s helmet and walking back to the home base). Afterwards, everyone returns to the barracks, breaks out the beer, and swaps war stories. As one re-enactor tells the author: “It’s just a bunch of grown men playing army.”That sounds about right.But presumably this explanation wasn’t going to mesmerize Thompson’s thesis advisers. So she kept digging.She retraces the roots of modern reenactment to the experimental days of the 1960s. In 1961, at a centennial commemoration of the Civil War, volunteers dressed up and staged a sham Battle of First Manasses.The event was a hit with both the volunteers and the Southern audience, who loved nothing more than watching Confederate soldiers romp Yankee troops. A few years later, a group of deserters became disenchanted with the proliferation of Civil War re-enactments, which they considered to be overly commercial and ahistorical. They went AWOL and started hosting private re-enactments of 20th-century wars.“Unlike Civil War reenactments, their events would be unknown to farbs, greedy event organizers, and funseeking spectators,” Ms. Thompson writes. “They would be ‘reenactments for reenactors.’ ” This new brigade liberated participants from public expectations and allowed them to indulge in such politically incorrect activities as mass executions and dressing up as Nazis.Today,private events feature battles from not only World War I and World War II but also the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the first Gulf War. It won’t be long until re-enactors transform some patch of backwoods Pennsylvania into Fallujah.Imitating a soldier doesn’t lead to real heroism, and it turns out pretending to be a war correspondent doesn’t result in riveting journalism.Throughout “War Games,” Ms. Thompson recounts bloodless battles in bloodless prose. To her credit, she uncovers plenty of potentially interesting characters – a paranoid German impersonator who hides his weekend hobby from his friends; a guy who is ostracized from his unit for being overweight; a star-crossed re-enactor whose last name happens to be Farb (imagine the ridicule!). But too often she buries these gems beneath an impenetrable maze of block quotations, internecine politics, and factoids about re-enactor demographics.It’s not entirely her fault, though. Reading about fake war stories is like listening to strangers retell their dreams. Sure a story about Jesus riding a pirate ship to the moon could be interesting, but, hey, it’s just a dream. Fake war stories suffer from a similar heart of emptiness. Re-enactors may love to regale one another with tall tales of narrowly escaping death. But for those of us who aren’t making believe, the stories pack as much punch as the blanks in their weapons.

Playing Private Ryan

Playing Private Ryan

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