They live a little bit of the big war
Author
By Michael Mcleod | Orlando Sentinel
They materialize in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon, camouflage netting stretched over their helmets, olive-drab leggings tucked over their combat boots, weathered M-1’s slung over their shoulders. They smell of canvas ammo belts. They look as if they’re ready to fight World War II all over again.
A senior officer steps forward, wearing the gold oak leaf clusters of a major and the dress uniform of the U.S. Army Rangers, circa 1942. He calls the small troop to attention, thanks them for coming, checks their weapons, tells them to form two columns. Then he barks out one final, critical command:
“Turn your cell phones on vibrate.”
That’s the sort of detail that can make or break this breed of weekend warrior. There were no cell phones at The Big One.
The 22 uniformed men who have lined up at the doorway of the Orlando VA Medical Center are World War II reenactors, preparing to march inside and pay homage to the real thing — a group of aging veterans, many of whom served during the war.
The small reenactors group is just part of a latter-day band of brothers that began cropping up across the country in the early 1970s.
Though neither as well-known nor as numerous as their Civil War counterparts, World War II reenactors are every bit as devoted. They form units based on the ones that played key roles in the war, complete with a chain of command and standards for moving up through the ranks from buck private to officer. They spend thousands on weapons, uniforms and salvaged military vehicles, such as the restored “Willie” Jeep this group at the VA hospital has brought along. They are sticklers for authenticity, down to the last button.
They participate in mock skirmishes throughout the country, most of them off-limits to spectators. The biggest of these is an annual reenactment of the Battle of the Bulge that draws nearly a thousand reenactors to Fort Indiantown Gap military base in central Pennsylvania.
The vast majority of the 6,000 hobbyists are middle-aged men, though there are groups, such as the Paper Dolls, that consist of women who portray nurses, Red Cross volunteers and French partisans. Most reenactors choose to portray GIs, but some outfit themselves as British, Russian, and yes, German soldiers: Somebody has to play the bad guy.
When they head for the woods to stage battles — firing blanks and heaving mock grenades packed with baking soda at one another — the code of honor calls for casualties to remove their helmets, wait 10 minutes or so. then rise, like a regenerated zombie in a video game, and rejoin the fray.
Once, at the Pennsylvania event, where parts of the battle are open to the public, an announcer preceded an analysis of a make-believe clash by advising the crowd: “The Germans have won the toss, and they will be attacking.”
Jenny Thompson, author of War Games: Inside the World of 20th Century War Reenactors, spent part of her time researching the book in the company of a group representing the U.S. Army’s 4th Armored Division. What impressed her most was how fussy they were about their uniforms.
“As they talked about their clothing and accessories,” she says, “the reenactors almost exemplified, I hate to say it, the stereotype of women.”
A hitch for history
Some of their activities might seem boyish, naive or even a little absurd. But when the World War II reenactors talk about the pursuit, they speak of motivations that have much deeper roots than outsiders might suspect.
Most are history buffs with a wide-ranging knowledge of the war and an encyclopedic grasp of the battles fought by the unit they have adopted.
Some start off as collectors. That Jeep in the hospital parking lot belongs to Bill Zukauskas, a 51-year-old industrial hygienist from Jacksonville. He also owns everything from a 1941 M1 Armored Scout Car to a cheap camera that was given him by a veteran who carried it at Omaha Beach on D-Day.
Some are fired by sheer patriotism. Dr. Juan Suarez, a 50-year-old Cuban-born Orlando internist, dates his passion for reenacting to an encounter with a real-life veteran during his internship at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The patient was a grizzled Army colonel who groused, in you-can’t-handle-the-truth style, that the United States is like a magnificent palace whose occupants are blissfully unaware of the debt they owe to those who are posted at the drawbridge.
Like most of the other participants who have assembled outside the veterans hospital, Suarez, who belongs to a unit of ersatz British paratroopers, relishes immersing himself in an era when heroism and villainy were far more clear-cut.
“It was not a war of aggression or conquest on our part,” he says. “We liberated people by the millions. It just staggers me to think of the unity and the sacrifices of that time. It was a special group of men who stormed those beaches.”
The longing for kinship with those heroic individuals, buffed to a gloss by the passage of time, is at the core for many reenactors.
“I think it’s important to relive it, and remind people that at one time, defending this country was an honor that no one questioned,” says Chris Colman, a 48-year-old Orange County deputy in real life, a private in Fox company as a reenactor.
You can get the big picture, the time line, the facts and the figures of that era out of a history book. That doesn’t satisfy reenactors such as Colman, who has organized the hospital visit. They want an experience, a sense of what it was like to be a common foot soldier. Like the science fiction and fantasy buffs who pose as Klingons and Gryffindors, they seek the vicarious experience of losing themselves in another world. They even have a phrase for it — “golden moment.”
One such small moment came to Zukauskas in the midst of a mock battle that included dodging not soldiers but armored vehicles. “A German half-track came crashing towards me. Here’s this big, rumbling, 16-ton piece of equipment going by. My heart was in my throat. I thought, OK. That’s a little bit of what it must have been like. That’s close enough for me.”
They were the real deal
But there is one last element of World War II reenacting that is even more pervasive than the quest for a golden moment. It revolves around an advantage that they have over those who prefer masquerading as Minutemen, Yanks and Rebs: Though the chances are diminishing with each passing year, they can still have face-to-face encounters with their heroes.
A wealth of such moments awaits as they march inside the veterans hospital, where, after a brief ceremony, one set of soldiers mingles with another.
The real-life veterans, most in their 70s and 80s, are arrayed across the rec room. There are 50 of them. Some sit on folding chairs in the front of the room, others are in wheelchairs just behind them, and finally, in back, there are those who’ve been wheeled down in portable beds.
Some wear baseball caps that advertise their branch of service and the wars in which they served. Jacob Miller’s is the gaudiest of the lot: a retired, 80-year-old command sergeant-major in the Army, he served in World War II, Vietnam, and Korea. When a small group of reenactors takes him outside for a closer look at the vintage Jeep, tears begin rolling down his cheeks.
Inside, another World War II vet asks a reenactor to let him heft his M-1.
“It’s a lot heavier than I remember,” he says.
Someone has found a tape of an old, old song, and now it plays softly in the background. “I don’t want to set the world on fire,” the Ink Spots sing. “I just want to set a fire in your heart.”
A vet in a wheelchair is telling a story to a small circle of rapt reenactors. It was a few days after D-Day, and he was looking for cover in the French countryside when he saw a foxhole, dove in, and discovered a Brit, brewing tea.
“Care for a cup?” said the Brit.
“Got something stronger?” asked the GI.
Yet there are those among the vets who could tell a tale or two but would rather not go into it. Some things nostalgia can’t erase.
Walter Morris is 88. With bright blue eyes and a ready smile, he is one of the most cheerful and active of the veterans in the hospital. He jokes with the reenactors. But he does not mention what it was like, as a POW in a German stalag, to be so close to starvation that when a fellow prisoner died, you kept the body around for as long as you could stand it, propping him up, telling the guards he was just napping, then divvying up his meal when it came around.
It just might be what Morris has on his mind when he gives one reenactor a small smile and says:
“You guys oughta be careful. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”
Originally Published: August 13, 2006 at 12:00 AM EST
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