Leaving Mundania (21 page)

Jeff, of course, was in it for the atmosphere. He did a lot of research because he wanted to be authentic and realistic so that he would understand what it had been like. He assembled his basic kit for about five hundred dollars and had it shipped to his office. When it arrived in its big box, his coworkers gathered around him as he opened it. They ooh-ed and ah-ed over the uniform, feeling the fabric and talking about how durable and tough it seemed. After fourteen years in the army, Jeff had become accustomed to his equipment—his gear felt like a second skin, completely natural for him to wear. As a reenactor, he had to get used to different equipment. For one thing, it wasn't warm. As winters go, the ones in Tennessee aren't bad, but spending the night outside with his reenactment unit, wearing only what World War II soldiers had worn—a T-shirt, shirt, jacket, and a scarf, maybe some gloves—he felt cold. In
Band of Brothers,
there were soldiers in blankets in their foxholes. Jeff read interviews with guys who had been through World War II in which they talked about how cold it got. This was the common experience of soldiers: the cold. He remembered how cold he'd been at times in Afghanistan, tried to imagine how soldiers in World War II had stood it in this flimsy gear,
powered by sheer will. Reenactment was a way of appreciating other soldiers and what they'd gone through.

Jeff learned a lot about the war from the 506th unit. He made some buddies who invited him to shows put on by and for collectors of war memorabilia, some of them very high end. They treated the shows like museums, going to look at gear and photographs as historical research that might help them reenact more accurately.

At an event, two forces would meet. They didn't tend to reenact Pacific battles with Japanese because a lot of those fights were naval, and therefore logistically difficult, and because the landscape of the South mimicked Europe far better than the tropics. The Americans would set up on one side of the field, with the opposition, generally reenactors playing German soldiers, on the other. Most of the time the two sides didn't talk but simply stared each other down, Jeff said. But someone had to play the enemy. A couple guys in Jeff's unit were friendly with some German reenactors and introduced him. The German reenactors talked about Eastern Front battles, tacticals between Russian and German forces, battles held on private land that had trench lines dug for this very purpose.

Tacticals fought in realistic trenches interested Jeff, though only German or Russian reenactors could participate, so he'd have to change units. German reenactment appealed to him more than Russian reenactment, in part for ease of research, since the Germans had left behind so much paperwork. Over time, Jeff got to know some of the German reenactors, one of whom portrayed a
Fallschirmjäger,
a German paratrooper. The uniforms were interesting, but Jeff wasn't convinced that he wanted to join the unit until he researched the
Fallschirmjägers,
learning that they viewed themselves as chivalrous. He found photos of these German paratroopers giving first aid to enemy troops and initially believed that their record was completely clear of war crimes, though recently he learned of some documented misdeeds, which he has started to research. Like members of the EOD in modern times, the
Fallschirmjägers
volunteered for that duty and weren't conscripts. He bought a basic German kit, lucked into a reproduction Mauser rifle, and joined the unit.

His German unit commander was a mechanic, and people who owned era-appropriate Jeeps or
Kübelwagens
would come to him because he knew how to service these ancient vehicles. Reenacting with vehicles was difficult—a Sherman tank, the type the Americans used, isn't easy to transport to and from events.

The details are important to most reenactors. Those who aren't into ensuring that their clothing has period-correct dye color, for example, are sometimes called “farbs.”
*
As Jeff pointed out, some people are lazy and will watch a couple movies and think they know everything they need to about reenactment. Jeff wasn't like that. He researched it.

Reenactors of any historical period can be insane about details; there's a common term across reenactment for people who are too intense about the minutia of costuming: stitch counters or thread Nazis. But when it comes to certain historical details, there were some unspoken rules for Jeff's unit. Websites for various units of
Fallschirmjägers
across the United States and Europe contain disclaimers at the bottoms of their pages stating that the groups are non-political historical societies who don't support or promote the Nazi regime in any way. Most pages also specify that neo-Nazis and other people with extremist political views are not welcome to join. And at core, Jeff isn't into Nazi reenactment because he's into Nazi ideology any more than a player portraying a necromancer at Knight Realms is into necromancy. For Jeff, reenactment is about simulating the feel of a historical period and imagining what World War II era soldiers went through on a daily basis. At the same time, Jeff's
Fallschirmjägers
never said
“Sieg Heil
” or did the Nazi salute because some boundaries are not meant to be crossed. The intent of reenactment, Jeff says, is not to offend but to entertain, enlighten, and educate.

Similarly, at Knight Realms, he remembers going out with a band of evil NPCs and one of them saw a village in the distance and said, “Let's rape and pillage it.” Jeff quickly asked the player to come up with something else. They could pillage the town and cut off the right hand of everyone in it, or pillage the town and do something else, but that idea of rape, no matter how off-the-cuff and fictional in this setting, was off limits. What if there were a rape survivor among the players? It was unacceptable to even joke about.

Jeff moved back to the East Coast and retired from army life in 2010, entering college in upstate New York. He is a history major and plans to focus on European history and military history and to go on to grad school one day. It's a new chapter in his life. He still attends Knight Realms regularly and intends to return to reenactment now that he's found a German unit nearby.

Jeff spent sixteen years in the army, attaining the rank of sergeant first class. It's clear he has complicated emotions surrounding his service. He took pride in his work while he was enlisted, says he took care of “my guys” and his duties, exercised the skills he took so much care to learn, and felt that brotherhood with his comrades. But the wars also cost him his peace of mind. It took him years to come to terms with his PTSD. He sometimes talks about how the propaganda whitewashes the job of a soldier, which is to kill people.

Politically, he says he is confused but loyal. He has an idea of what Vietnam might have been like. He gives the distinct impression that he is glad to be out of the army. His close friend Joe Bondi, who has larped with him for the last twenty years, says that feeling is new for Jeff, that it was hard for him to retire and leave the bomb disarmament to someone else. Given his mixed emotions about the army and war, it's curious that all of Jeff's hobbies—miniature war gaming, larp, reenactment—have to do with war, fighting, or violence in some manner. Joe tells me that Jeff painted war-gaming miniatures while deployed abroad and that he suspects that they served as a tether to the here and now for Jeff. Jeff himself talks about his love for larp, which predated his long stint in the military, and how it introduced him to so many great people, like Joe or his roommate, Terry. He says this old guard sometimes laughs that in twenty years of larp, no one
has died. Sure, people have had asthma attacks and twisted ankles, but in all that time, no one has fallen off a cliff or died of exposure or been mauled by a bear.

Maybe World War II reenactment offers Jeff a safe space in which to relive and deal with what he saw on deployment, a way to revisit it in an environment where he has some control over circumstances and outcome. Maybe he games for the simple pleasure of it, because he loves stories and has always been fascinated with war. Maybe he larps because in a synthetic reality, everything has meaning, and heroism is still possible. At Knight Realms, he started out as the hero paladin Aradiel, but now, twelve years later, he can't play that role anymore. Instead, he's created a new character and a new history for himself, a man named Radu Dragovic, a gravedigger.

*
No one quite knows where the word came from, but as Tony Horwitz pointed out in
Confederates in the Attic,
which explored Civil War reenactment: “‘Farb' was the worst insult in the hard-core vocabulary. It referred to reenactors who approached the past with a lack of verisimilitude. The word's etymology was obscure; [reenactor Robert] Young guessed that ‘farb' was short for ‘far-be-it-from authentic,' or possibly a respelling of ‘barf.'”

A
thick, putrid smoke permeates this place. Broken Jersey barriers and other rubble cover the ground. Lit-up oil barrels offer flickering light in the darkness, and in the distance, bright lights flash at irregular intervals. Machine guns fire continuously, and the cry of “More ammo!” sounds periodically. A small team of soldiers in fatigues and with guns on their backs has dragged two of their bleeding fellows into a cinderblock room, attempting to stabilize the patients while one of them calls in the injuries over the radio.

But the man with the book and the flashlight that gleams so brightly in the darkness is only calling someone in the next room to report mock injuries. This isn't real, but it's not a game either; the simulation, which helps soldiers practice lifesaving techniques under stressful battle conditions, is part of Combat Lifesaver Training at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, a National Guard training
center. I spent a day visiting the site to examine how the army uses something very like larp to prepare its soldiers for real battle. This particular training simulation is realistic—these rooms have roused vivid memories for some veterans preparing for deployment.

It's not just the darkness, the rubble, or the flashing lights that give soldiers flashbacks, says Captain Adam Bickford, the medical operations officer in charge of the Medical Battalion Training Site at Fort Indiantown Gap. Most particularly, it's the smell that sends some soldiers back. According to Captain Bickford, the training area is equipped with smell generators that send out smoke that smells like war—like blazing diesel, sewers, or burning human flesh. The smell generators aren't military grade—they come from a special effects company. Captain Bickford's least favorite odor is the eau de sewer, which we're enjoying together. The smell is faint at first, unfamiliar, with a hint of rotten, and after ten minutes I'm still not used to it; its unpleasantness has become pervasive without becoming more intense, a fragrant backdrop to the action. Captain Bickford warns me that the smell clings to clothing. If they don't open the doors and fan out the room, it can linger for weeks. Sometimes after training, he says, they run a coffee odor through the smell generators to help clear the rooms.

The tapes of machine gun fire are less high-tech. I wonder if they are recordings taken during battle, but Captain Bickford informs me that they're audio tapes from a Hollywood sound website.

He takes me and Major Corey Angell, the post's public affairs officer and my escort for the day, into another room, this time one with the lights on, although it is also filled with sewer smoke. Captain Bickford says that they must have just finished up training in this room. When we walk through the doorway, we appear to be standing on some sort of porch. In front of us, a door leads into a shed-like structure with windows cut into it, a mock house made with drywall and two-by-fours. A poor legless, armless dummy lies on the ground inside, rubber lips open. To our right is a deck with a banister and steps that lead down to the ground, out into a large open space. There is a human hand lying on the banister—well, a firm rubber hand with realistic modeling and a wire loop coming out of the wrist.

Captain Bickford says that the army, and sometimes teams of state and local first responders, including the Veteran's Affairs emergency medical response team, practice house rescues here. The army sometimes uses amazingly lifelike moving dummies controlled by computer for training, he says. In fact, for Halloween he is thinking of dressing up this area as a haunted house and inviting military families inside. We all laugh. For a moment, he's thinking like a larper instead of an army captain.

As we're leaving, another door opens, a door down the deck stairs and across the room from us, and several soldiers in fatigues enter. Apparently they've forgotten their poor patient's hand and have returned to retrieve it. We leave quickly to allow them to complete their exercise in peace.

These simulators are a part of the training for combat lifesavers and combat medics at Fort Indiantown Gap. Of course, the army trains medics before deployment, but it also trains many ordinary soldiers in a variety of EMT-like duties, from controlling bleeds to chest decompression to treating a collapsed lung. Training begins with classroom instruction and practice on dummies, and soldiers work their way up to the elaborate scenarios filled with stressors. The goal for combat lifesavers is to make the techniques so automatic that they can perform them under pressure. The lights, the smoke, and the smell are all part of increasing the stress a trainee is under. In advanced scenarios the army also uses moulage kits, essentially makeup kits, to make realistic, stomach-turning wounds on live patients in order to help combat lifesavers and medics learn to assess injuries. Moulage simulates any kind of visible injury, including bruises, burns, compound fractures, open wounds, and, at the highest levels, amputation. Combat lifesavers learn basic techniques, while medics require a more complex and deeper understanding of injuries, and the intricacy of moulage used to simulate wounds varies accordingly. At its simplest, moulage is fake blood purchased from a Halloween store, but if there's the budget for it—and at Fort Indiantown Gap there is—it includes high-quality fake blood, makeup, and latex prosthetics. Captain Bickford says that he's got some guys with art backgrounds who help create prosthetics and a couple who have
been trained at the military's moulage school, where they learn to create and apply realistic moulage.