Comments by "Evan" (@MrEvanfriend) on "Military History not Visualized" channel.

  1. I couldn't disagree more. As a combat veteran myself, I see this as having less than zero educational value, and find it insulting rather than honoring. Demonstrations of equipment notwithstanding, this serves only to give a deeply flawed impression of what military life, and especially combat, is like. Turning the worst day of someone's life - and often a defining moment in who they are - into a weekend of fun honors nobody. Though it may be in good faith, it's still rather insulting. "Hey look at me, I can dress up like you did and run up this hill!" "When I did it, they had artillery registered on us, machine guns with interlocking fields of fire, and I was covered in my best friend's blood after I watched him die in front of me. It's still a defining experience of my life 75 years later" "Oh, well obviously we aren't doing any of that, but it'll be fun to show what it was like for you!" This strikes me as beyond tone-deaf and deeply disrespectful, regardless of intent. Besides the inherently disrespectful nature of this, it's atrociously bad history. As I insinuated above, guys running around in the proper costume shooting blanks at each other is not even a crude facsimile of what combat is like. It's a couple of superficial similarities attempting to mask deep, fundamental differences. And that only obfuscates the realities of war. We honor those who fought by remembering, by listening to the stories of the few who remain, and making sure as many of those stories are recorded for posterity before it's too late. Turning the horrors of war into a fun weekend event honors no one, educates no one, and is generally a mess. Best not to.
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  2.  @tostie3110  There are plenty of combat veterans still around. I'm a combat vet in my 30s. Most of my friends are combat vets in their 30s. There were differences in the experience of a soldier in WWII and one today. Nobody doubts that. Different uniforms, different weapons, no body armor or night vision goggles, etc. The combat was a lot more intense than anything that happens today, for sure. And training was expedited as armies worldwide expanded massively. That being said, there's a reason that every Marine I've ever talked to who fought in WWII instantly accepted me as every bit as much of a Marine as he was, and dismissed the idea that we, in the Corps today, were walking in the footsteps of giants - left by men, by Marines, like them. It's because soldiering has always been soldiering. And despite the weapons and equipment, despite paradigm shifts in military strategy and tactics and leaps in technology, the modern US Marine armed with an M27 IAR and kitted out with all manner of high-tech gear has a whole lot in common with the Roman legionary armed with pila and a sword and armored in iron. The details change, the experience stays the same - from letters home asking for warm socks to graffiti complaining about superiors and drawing dicks.
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  3.  @lazydragon2551  I don't play video games personally, and don't have too much insight on them. That being said, I don't think that video games are quite the same thing as this. The main difference is that video games are entertainment - they don't market themselves as educational, they don't claim in any way to increase understanding of history, and everyone playing knows that there's a very real, very significant difference between hitting buttons to see a reaction on a TV screen and actual live people doing things. A guy sitting in a recliner with a controller in his hand and a bag of Doritos and Big Gulp nearby doesn't think that he's in any way, shape, or form recreating the experience of war.
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  4.  @amerigo88  As a US Marine veteran, I know that if I saw a bunch of people getting their kicks by dressing up in desert MARPAT and reenacting Fallujah, I'd step in and put a stop to it, and I'd give them all an ass-chewing worthy of the meanest 1stSgt who ever spent way too long on the drill field. I find this stuff deeply disrespectful, and I fail to see any educational value in people dressing up in accurate costumes and then pretending that running around shooting blanks is anything close to an accurate depiction of combat.
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  5.  David McDonald  Wow, the arrogance there is unbelievable. You paid taxes because you have a legal duty to do so, just like everyone else. It isn't praiseworthy, so get down off your high horse. Did I say I'd use force? I said I'd step in and chew some ass. To hopefully make enough fools feel enough shame to quit of their own accord. That isn't force.
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  6. These silly reenactments don't give you a perspective on anything. They're bad history to the point of being no more than satire. They get the uniforms meticulously correct, and then get everything else astoundingly wrong - dressing up like a soldier doesn't make you one, and it's very plain that these people have not even a modicum of military training. They say that the difference between men and boys is the price of their toys. This "reenactment" nonsense is proof positive of that. The difference between this and a bunch of 10-year-old children playing at war is that instead of a few scraps of camouflage clothing, these assholes shelled out for authentic uniforms and equipment. Instead of whatever plastic piece of crap in the general shape of a rifle, these assholes shelled out for replica M1s that fire blanks - or maybe even for real M1s which someone ruined by plugging the barrel. Despite the authentic looking weapons and gear, these are overgrown children playing army, and they look like overgrown children playing army. The fact that people who don't know any better look at this shit and say "this must be kinda like what war is like" just goes to show how deeply counterproductive it is for understanding history. They're inhibiting understanding under the guise of "education".
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  7. I find a lot of this highly tacky and disrespectful. Exhibiting the working vehicles and equipment of the era is certainly valuable (and probably really fun as well). The rest of this? It's foolish and satirical. This isn't an assault on a beach. It isn't training for an assault on a beach. It's amateur theater posing as history, and in doing so, it gives a lot of false impressions, and inhibits understanding rather than increasing it. These guys are playing army. They're doing so with nice costumes and good gear, but in the end, they're still playing. That silliness is not what the invasion at Normandy was like. Sure, the clothes and equipment are correct, but the atmosphere is, by necessity, sanitized past the point where it can be called a "reenactment". There's no life or death struggle here. There's no risk - nothing is at stake, we all know the good guys win, and at the end of the day, nobody gets hurt and everyone takes off their costumes and has a beer together. I find all of this deeply disrespectful. War is serious, it's hard, and it can be hellish. It isn't a lark for a weekend before heading back to your job as an accountant or whatever on Monday morning - and trying to "reenact" it as such misses all the important points so hard that this can only be considered satire. That a few WWII vets shook hands with these clowns struck me as sad. I'm a veteran myself. I know that if, 50 years from now, I see a bunch of clowns dressed up like Marines "reenacting" Fallujah, I'll step in and put a stop to it. I understand that this is (largely) done in good faith. But good faith or not, it isn't, and shouldn't be acceptable. It's not quite stolen valor, but it's very close. Nobody with actual military experience would walk through that camp and see soldiers. A bunch of middle-aged fat guys (and women!) dressed in appropriate costumes does not a military camp make, and the atmosphere and general demeanor of everyone involved is entirely unlike that of a military unit. The vehicles are really cool - tanks and planes and everything else. I'm all for that kind of stuff. A demonstration of the individual soldier's gear also has some value. But mash this all together into a bloodless (literally and figuratively) pretend "invasion", and you're diminishing any historical understanding you get from the demonstrations, and essentially making a mockery of history and of the men who fought and died there.
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  8.  @MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized  I've only ever talked about it with one other veteran (when we saw some of these reenactors). He agreed with me fully. We'd both thought that it was kinda a cool thing until actually seeing it. It struck me as people embarrassing themselves without realizing it. As for the active service members there, I imagine that they're there on orders - and wouldn't be surprised if they're mostly recruiters. For vets, I don't know. Maybe nostalgia? I miss the Marine Corps all the time, it was, the actual war notwithstanding, the best time in my life. This doesn't seem to me like a reasonable facsimile of military experience though. And especially not of war. It's the pretend "assaults" that really get me. I don't see how playing at the worst day in someone's life could be anything but disrespectful.
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  9. But really the only thing that's accurate is the equipment. The rest of this looks nothing like the military. It looks like about 90% amateur theater and 10% boy scouts. There's no military feel to it whatsoever - they have the look down, and nothing else. If, for whatever bizarre reason, there was a "public interface" on a company-sized forward operating base in Iraq when I was there - and I can only imagine that the similarities between that and a WWII era forward military encampment are greater than the differences - it wouldn't look anything like that. "Why are you dirty?" "Because there's no fuckin showers". "Why are you burning all this shit and garbage" "You probably don't want to breathe this shit in. 1stSgt told me to burn it". "What's that thing on your leg?" "My useless fuckin gas mask. Some asshole at Division decided we'd have to lug them around" "why?" "Iono". In truth, it would mostly be a few guys standing post, a few guys doing working parties, and mostly just guys standing around without most of their gear on smoking cigarettes and bullshitting.
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  10.  @dylanmilne6683  The doing manual labor, standing around smoking and joking, and carrying stupid shit that you won't ever use bits are relatively accurate I suppose - though I suspect that reenactors carry more stupid shit than actual soldiers who learn what they don't need and stop lugging it around to save weight do. The smoking and joking bits, however, are likely very tame compared to real life military. Among other things, I've gotten in an actual fight during a discussion about girls' names when I said that Mercedes is a stripper name, someone else said his mom was named Mercedes, and I said that I think I slipped some singles into her g-string; heard a SSgt say "you know what I love about the Marine Corps? It's the only place in the world where 'motherfucker' counts as a term of endearment" (that one got laughs), and generally any and all manner of conversation you can think of that would be deeply inappropriate for any kind of public interface. Also, "fuck" is used pretty much in every sentence by everyone.
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  11. Reenactment like this is the absolute worst way of studying history. It hits on the superficial while ignoring the important parts of what the experience of war is like.
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  12.  @ronald8673  It isn't "the closest there is". It isn't even remotely close. You focus on the uniforms and equipment. These are superficial. You entirely miss the essence of combat - and you couldn't possibly capture it, either. Combat isn't about what clothes you're wearing, or what equipment you're carrying. It's a real struggle where people are trying to kill each other. Do you like football? I like football. If you'd ever been in combat, you'd probably be used to football metaphors. Anyway, a good football game is a far better analog of combat than this nonsense you people do. While the stakes are certainly nowhere near the same, football is real people actually trying to impose their will on an opposing force. The stakes are different, the setting and equipment are different, but the element of struggle remains. A football game doesn't have a predetermined outcome like these "battles" you play at. Playing in or even watching a football game is exciting, because you don't know what will happen. What you're doing is amateur theater. The Germans never win, nobody ever gets hurt, and everyone watching knows exactly what will happen. Contact sports are much more like combat, because they don't follow a narrative, you have to overcome other people trying to stop you to win - there is suspense and struggle involved.
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  13.  @annedebroeck2451  I'd wager that they're a very small minority among WWII vets. Most vets don't appreciate mockery - and make no mistake, this is mockery and nothing more.
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  14.  @annedebroeck2451  I'd wager otherwise. Veterans tend to dislike being mocked.
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  15.  @annedebroeck2451  I have no problem with that stuff. The "battles" are where I have a problem. Dressing in the uniforms to demonstrate how the uniform was worn, and how the equipment was carried (although from what I've seen, this tends to be done awkwardly and looks more like what a manual says the uniform ought to look like than what uniforms in the field actually look like - two very different things) has actual educational value. When it gets to the "running around pretending to shoot at each other" bit is where I draw the line. That stuff is satire, it gives all the wrong impressions, it hinders understanding, and I find it grossly disrespectful in every way.
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  16.  @annedebroeck2451  I have been in combat. Yes, there's more to a soldier's life, most of it is either doing working parties, standing post, or hanging around the smoke pit bullshitting. Patrols count as combat, as far as I'm concerned, even if nobody is actively firing at you. The "patrols" that these guys do don't look military, they look like guys in costumes going for a walk.
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  17.  @ronald8673  To paraphrase Orwell, being in a minority of one does not make you wrong. You don't train like they did. You don't have the resources for it. You don't have the men, the land, or the money. You may try your best to replicate it, but you will inherently fail. Do you cut people who don't match the exacting physical standards? Do you cut people for tactical incompetence? Of course not. The difference between people training for war, people who are heading into a real conflict, where decisions will make the difference between life and death, and people LARPing, is fundamental. When it comes to the battle itself, the difference between what actually happened and what you're doing is the difference between shit and soft serve ice cream. You're all running about and shooting blanks, and that isn't the same as lining up your sights on an actual human being and pulling the trigger to fire a live round at him. You say that there are always a couple of vets there. I don't deny that. But I do question how representative these vets are of the veteran community as a whole. Because as a veteran myself, I find all of this abhorrent, and my veteran friends all feel the same. This isn't equivalent to the 75th anniversary of D-day that happened this year. A couple of actual US Army paratroopers dressed in period uniforms jumping with a man in his 90s, in front of the president of the United States, at an otherwise solemn occasion, isn't the same thing. One of my good friends is a US Army paratrooper. He can talk about the Normandy Campaign the way I, as a Marine, can talk about the Guadalcanal Campaign. I know for a fact that he finds these "reenactments" to be little more than vulgar farce. As a man who proudly bears the tradition of the First Marine Division (we don't wear the patches on our uniforms anymore, but that patch means something anyway), the blue diamond with the Southern Cross and the red 1 with GUADALCANAL emblazoned on it, I'd be furious if I saw a bunch of people pretending to be Marines pretending to do the Guadalcanal Campaign - to say nothing of the actual war I've actually fought in. This "reenactment" nonsense is the one advantage to the relative lack of recognition that the Marine Corps gets. People are more likely to pretend to be the Army in Europe than the Corps in the Pacific. I'm selfishly thankful for that. I've been asked to describe what combat is like any number of times. The answer that I've settled on is that I say it's like sex - if you haven't done it, you can't appreciate it. I then mention the caveat that in every other regard, it's pretty much the opposite of sex. And based on that metaphor, I'm gonna say that what you're doing is to combat like a PG-13 sex scene is to the best sex you've ever had in your life.
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  18.  @ronald8673  It isn't TV. It's worse. You watch professional actors with a big budget in Band of Brothers, that gives you SOME idea of what war is like. Because the budgets can pay for things like special effects, the cameras can focus on small parts of the wider conflict, and professional actors can make you believe that they're the people they're pretending to be. It's the difference between a Hollywood production and an amateur theater production. Neither is the real thing, but a good Hollywood production (and there are few enough of those) can actually represent what combat is like. Your amateur theater productions can't. They have all of the shortcomings with none of the advantages that Hollywood has. I'm sure you care about the history far more than any of the actors in Band of Brothers. But you do an exponentially worse job at portraying the history.
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  19.  @MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized  No, it isn't. Hollywood can show the explosions and the fire, the blood and the wreckage, the terror, the scale of the battle, etc. This is just amateur theater. It can show none of that. Hollywood may be deeply flawed, but it can give you an exponentially better representation of what combat is like. As for blisters, I went through combat without any. If you have decent boots, you shouldn't get them.
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  20.  @rickyricardo5441  It's a "great way" to give people bad ideas about history. Nobody who has seen combat and then seen a reenactment would tell you that the reenactment was even remotely accurate to what combat is like. It's grown men playing dress-up, and then trying to rationalize what they're doing by claiming it's "educational" or whatever nonsense.
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  21.  @jeffreymcintire8273  Keep telling yourself that. You're still a loser playing dress up, and veterans think that you're a disrespectful asshole too.
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  22. No, you weren't. You dressed up in a costume as one of the men from that unit. A man who you mock while claiming that you're "honoring" by trivializing his sacrifice, and by turning what was probably the worst day of his life into a fun weekend. A man whose brass you wouldn't rate to pick up, whose boots you'd be unworthy to shine. There's nothing worse than mocking while claiming to "pay respect", or inhibiting understanding under the guise of "education". What you are doing is deeply unethical, and I hope you'll take some time to reflect on that before the next time you join in one of these farcical events.
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  23. I'd be interested to hear what this vet said. Because as a veteran myself (I fought in Iraq), I find this to be farcical and satirical. I am of the opinion that dressing up as soldiers and playing at war for a weekend inhibits actual understanding and disrespects those who actually fought.
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  24.  @jvleasure  The battles themselves are facially ridiculous. Until they start shooting live rounds, it's never going to be anywhere close to the reality of war. As for the other stuff, the "what songs they sang, what they joked about" bits, I think it still misses the mark. First, though the songs change (when I was in Iraq, the most popular song in my unit was "Sittin at a Bar" by Rehab), I imagine the jokes are largely the same dating back to the Roman legions. The food changes, but has been consistently bad since forever. Though I've heard MREs are better than the old C-rations. What they talked about? They talked about back home. Girlfriends, stories of shit they did as teenagers, etc. Whether they banged out some broad or gained carnal knowledge of a comely lass is more superficiality. They argued about pointless shit, like the proper way to pronounce various words that are pronounced differently in different regions (whether soda is called soda or pop was something that we could spend an entire day arguing about), which region has the best food (food is often a topic of conversation), and similar "my hometown/city/state/region is better than yours" nonsense. They bitched about their superiors, and told stories about the dumb shit that they'd seen them do. Pretty much, soldiers are soldiers. If I was magically transported back in time and landed with the Continental Army in 1778, the clothes would be different, the slang would be different, and they'd be smoking clay pipes instead of Marlboro Reds, but I guarantee I'd fit in and be able to relate in about five minutes.
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  25. It fails at both honoring and teaching. I say that it disrespects and mocks while offering false impressions.
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  26.  @carlhicksjr8401  A large indictment for sure, but I think it's a fair one. These reenactments supposedly aim to teach about war. At this they fail in every regard, and do more to hinder understanding than to help. Take, for example, this "assault" on a beach. If you think this gives any notion of what an opposed landing looks like, there's no two ways about it, you're wrong. Yes, the superficial aspects are there - correct outfits and weapons, guys running up a beach. That's where the similarities end. There is a vast, unbridgeable difference between guys running up a beach firing blanks and guys dressed the same way running up a defended beach, with everyone actually trying to kill each other. Having some combat experience myself (in Iraq, nothing near the intensity of an opposed landing), I can tell you that it looks a lot more like kids playing army, only with really nice toys, than it does like war. It's missing literally all of the aspects that make war what it is. I'm not one to defend Hollywood, but you can get the idea of what an opposed landing, or combat in general, is like a lot better from a well done movie than you can from nonsense like this. The differences are things like special effects, which can replicate things like mortar/artillery impacts, casualties (especially the more gruesome ones), explosions, etc a lot better than can be done with the amateur effects that these people use. Selective camera work can also be used to great effect, focusing on localized sections of the combat rather than trying to give an impression with only a tiny fraction of the men actually involved. And lastly, professional actors who are good at pretending to be other people and showing emotions that they aren't actually feeling help. The landing scene in Saving Private Ryan does far more to convey what combat is like, and specifically what the Normandy landings were like, than these people. Another huge point, that I touched on before, is that these people may look like soldiers, but they don't act like soldiers. Besides the fact that they're too old and fat, these are guys who are clearly not facing death, clearly not halfway around the world from home, clearly not worried about Jodie fucking their girlfriends or about what will happen tomorrow, or about their douchebag 1stSgt and incompetent lieutenant, or about any of the other things that soldiers worry about. They're guys who, after this is over, are going to change into their regular clothes, get into their Ford Expedition, turn on the air conditioning, and drive home, where they have a shower, a hot meal, and a bed waiting for them. They may all even get together and have a beer first. Basically, these guys are there because they want to be there, and it shows. In an actual war, everyone just wants to go home, only they can't. And that shows as well.
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  27.  @carlhicksjr8401  A lot of your defense here seemed to be of the living history aspect rather than the actual "battles". Let me be clear - I don't mind that at all. Especially when it comes to these WWII vehicles, but with the individual equipment as well (though the answer to questions like "why was this commander put in place" and "why was this particular piece of gear issued" are virtually always going to be "because it was his turn" and "because that's who bid lowest and got the government contract". That stuff has value. But when it comes to the "battles", I maintain my position. I think that the necessarily sanitized version of clean, unafraid people pretending to fight only serves to give false impressions and thus to obfuscate and hinder understanding. And I know that if I ever saw a bunch of guys dressed up as Marines in the early-mid 2000s reenacting Fallujah, I'd be offended to the point where I'd step in and give them all an ass-chewing worthy of a 1stSgt who just caught the whole company running a train on his daughter. Now, I've never been to one of these Civil War reenactments. When I visited the battlefield at Gettysburg a couple years ago, I saw a few guys dressed up as Union soldiers setting up a tent, and payed them no mind. I know that they do that stuff there, and I have a problem with that for an additional reason - any time you have a big event with lots of people milling about, stuff will invariably get dropped and some things will be left behind, no matter how much they try to clean up after themselves. And doing so on the actual battlefield risks their detritus being mixed with that of the actual soldiers from the actual battle. Is that period appropriate button on Little Round Top left by the 20th Maine, or by someone pretending to be a member of the 20th Maine 150 years later? I think that that does everyone a disservice. Also, and this is less germane to WWII than to the Civil War, but what happens when you're done charging, when you actually get there? You obviously aren't going to be firing blanks in each other's faces at point blank range for safety reasons, much less stabbing each other with bayonets or trying to crack skulls with the butt of a musket. What is it, a little "clash" where people pretend to fight? "Hey Jimmy, you're totally dead now, I just got you with my bayonet" "bullshit Mike, you know I got you first" "Ow, dammit Tim, that was too hard, that hurt" "Oh shit, I'm sorry, I'll buy you a beer afterwards". When I was walking around at Gettysburg, I developed a deep respect for the men who fought there on both sides - especially for the Confederates who attacked what were essentially unassailable positions. I walked up Little Round Top where they would have, and it wasn't the world's easiest stroll when I was going at my own pace and had only tourists at the top - and I could only try, and fail, to imagine what it would have been like running up that hill with musketry pouring down. The fact that men did this - and almost succeeded - amazed me. I don't think that guys pretending to do it, pretending to shoot each other down as they charged or defended, would help anyone understand that. I think it would give a diminished understanding - the idea that "that isn't so bad". And I think the idea that "this isn't so bad" dishonors the memory of the men who charged up that hill - and the men who defended it. Because as hard as that charge must've been, I can't imagine what it was like for the defenders when they kept coming despite the musketry. It's that stuff that's important to understanding military history. I don't think that anyone at Gettysburg gave a flying fuck about the Union or slavery or any of that other stuff, certainly not during the fighting itself. As a combat veteran, you must know that the experience of combat is very hard to explain to people who haven't experienced it themselves. Basically, I've settled on saying that it's like sex - unless you've done it, you really can't describe it. And I think for far too many people, these reenactments give a very false impression of what combat is like.
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  28.  @carlhicksjr8401  But you aren't humanizing the battle. If you want to do that, listen to stories from the veterans of that battle while we still can. Record those stories for posterity. Find pictures and basic biographical information about men who died there. You know what would humanize it a lot more than some asshole in a costume pretending to shoot some other asshole in a costume? A portrait of PFC Smith from Butte, Montana or Des Moines, Iowa or some other place, who joined the Army at age 17, trained for war, and was killed within five minutes of landing. Real stories of real people - not a bunch of assholes in costumes running around shooting fake guns at each other. It doesn't matter that it's "exciting", it's doing the exact opposite of your stated goal. What you're in these "battles" is the equivalent of a porno movie without sex scenes - entirely pointless and not at all a reasonable example of what you are attempting to show. The essense of combat is not what clothes the belligerents are wearing or what equipment they're carrying or anything like that. The essense of combat is extreme, life or death struggle. The essense of combat is violence - these people are trying to kill each other. The "confusion" here just stems from fools with no military training not knowing what it is they're doing. The confusion of combat is very, very different - changed objectives, unclear chains of command due to casualties, terror, etc. It isn't the same. A demonstration of vehicles and equipment and whatnot, along with presentation somehow or other of actual stories from actual men who fought, has historical value. If you have to dress up in costumes to do it, fine - just try not to look like a complete bag of dicks (a lot of these reenactors look like complete bags of unwashed dicks). This running around pretending to fight a battle has no educational value of any kind, and amounts to mockery of the men who actually fought these battles.
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  29.  @carlhicksjr8401  All that stuff that you just said is undoubtedly good....and seems to contradict the "battles" themselves, which I still find grossly disrespectful and bad history. I don't think it could possibly do an adequate job of humanizing casualties, either. A battle casualty doesn't just lie down and then get up when a bugle calls. It's significantly more horrible than that - and especially so during the Civil War, when the new Minie balls were leaving disastrous wounds, and the "treatment" available for the wounded was generally limited to whiskey and a hacksaw. I think that by portraying this in an inaccurate manner - which is the only way possible, without people actually killing each other - you are doing a disservice.
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  30.  @carlhicksjr8401  Almost all of what you said there sounds fine. What I can't get past is the "battle" itself. I didn't know the stuff about the water tables and the disease effects. But I have seen the battlefield. And I can only imagine what it was like for boys from Alabama and Texas to charge up Little Round Top only to be cut down by boys from Pennsylvania and Maine who, by all rights, should have been their friends. And no pretending can capture the horror of it, or the tragedy of Americans killing each other over anything - no matter the importance of the issue. And I think that the reenactments by necessity gloss over these important details. If you took a 7.62 to the shin, I have all respect for you and for the wound you took. I was lucky enough never to earn a Purple Heart. But mentioning such things can't truly show the horror of the Civil War "surgeon" whose primary tools were a hacksaw and a bottle of whiskey. And to show a sanitized "medical tent" without limbs being sawed off of conscious men doesn't do much if you ask me. I think it was William Tecumseh Sherman who said something to the effect of "people say that war is all glory, but it is all hell". What I say is that these reenactments cannot show the part that is all hell, and since they can't do that, they can't show the parts that are glory either. War brings out the best and the worst that man has to offer. Both sadistic brutality and selfless sacrifice, and everything in between. And this cannot be portrayed well by guys pretending to do what these men actually did. And as such, I think it disrespects the fallen and the veterans alike by giving false impressions.
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  31. Rather than doing that, try joining the actual military.
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  32.  @Booker8991  I think Airsoft is just ridiculous. Now, that isn't to say that grabbing an Airsoft gun and shooting at your friends can't be fun - it absolutely is fun. When I was in the Marines a bunch of us had Airsoft guns and shot at each other with them. But these people who buy all manner of tactical gear, whether it be cheap Chinese knockoffs or the real thing, and take Airsoft seriously, are ridiculous. You don't need to spend like $600 on Crye Precision cammies plus God only knows how many thousands on gear that you don't even know how to use to shoot your friends with Airsoft guns. I think a lot of these people are toolboxes. They kind who think that Airsoft makes them basically a ReconRangerDeltaSEAL, who like telling stories about how they ALMOST joined the military, but then some excuse came up. Airsoft is also adults playing army, and making fools of themselves in the process. The big difference between Airsoft and these reenactments is that Airsoft is in no way claiming to be educational, and isn't done for public consumption.
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  33.  @Sparks127  That's a bit different. I forget what they call it, "experimental archeology" or something like that. Trying to figure out how people did things based on relatively limited information. Plus, I kinda have to admit, whacking people with swords looks like a lot of fun. That being said, while figuring out the armor and equipment is pretty cool, and hitting people with swords is cool and looks really fun, when you get a bunch of dudes in chainmail "reenacting" the battle of Hastings, it's still giving amazingly bad impressions as to what actually happened there. I don't know what medieval combat was like - nobody does anymore. And I can't imagine that this is a good analog of it. A lot less projectiles flying about, calm horses, and nobody getting seriously injured, much less killed, are big differences. I think there is a little bit of value in figuring out how to fight with the weapons of the day and such, but it gives, at best, a very incomplete picture. That's very different from, say, WWII, where we know the tactics, where we know how to shoot a rifle, and shooting blanks at each other teaches us absolutely nothing. A war within living memory, captured on countless reels of film and innumerable photographs, with weapons still in use today (the M2 .50 machine gun is the standard NATO heavy machine gun, the M1911 and Browning Hi-Power pistols are still in use with a number of countries, and the MG3 machine gun, used in a number of European armies, is just the MG42 rechambered in 7.62 NATO), and more memoirs, manuals, after action reports, etc surviving than one could read in a lifetime doesn't require dressing up and pretending to shoot each other to understand. A war fought a millennium ago using weapons and equipment that are obsolete to the point of being all but forgotten, with a fragmentary documentation from the era before the printing press (much less the camera), is a bit different.
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  34.  @amerigo88  Vehicles in parades is an entirely different thing. That's preserving historical equipment as opposed to making dubious attempts to portray history. I have zero problem with that, and think it should be encouraged. Keeping history alive is always commendable. But I don't think that these reenactments do that at all - I think they only serve to give a false example of history. Some kid who doesn't know any better might see this nonsense and think "that's what WWII was like. It doesn't look so bad". And that idea might stick, no matter how much he hears about the Guadalcanal campaign, or the landing on Tarawa, or the Battle of the Bulge. It gives bad ideas that take root in lieu of good ideas. I think it's a lucky thing for you that Desert Storm reenactments will likely never become a thing - my understanding (though I'm too young to have fought there) is that it was heavily mechanized and that air played a big role in every phase of the conflict, things that make reenactment difficult to impossible. I feel the same way about my own war - the urban fighting in Fallujah is not a good candidate for these reenactors to butcher due to the very nature of urban warfare. Definitely keep the vehicles and the history alive. If, someday, I get to show my grandkids an old uparmored highback Humvee in a parade, I'd be thrilled, and I'd tell them (heavily sanitized) stories of the times I rolled around al-Anbar province in such a vehicle. But if I see a bunch of clowns in desert MARPAT and Interceptor vests pretending to kick down doors while clowns dressed up as muj pretend to shoot at them, I'd take offense.
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  35.  @flynntaggart1820  I'm quite hard to offend. Mocking military service will do it though. Your "Army Iraq combat vet" who has been "reenacting for over 20 years" sounds full of shit to me. Iraq combat vet would most likely put him between 30-40 years old - unless he was some tampon from the National Guard or some such foolishness. Which means that 20 years ago, he was either (1) a child, or (2) a junior enlisted soldier who wouldn't have the time or the money for such foolishness. So I suspect that he's not a combat vet at all - I suspect that he may have been some tampon who deployed to the Green Zone or somewhere similarly POGish where he never once saw an armed enemy. So yeah, I'd chew him out for disrespecting veterans - and probably for stolen valor, too. Just because you know one asshole who claims to have been in the Army doesn't mean that this nonsense isn't far more satire than history, and it doesn't mean that it isn't disrespectful. There's always THAT GUY. At best, your "veteran" butt-buddy was THAT GUY in his unit.
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  36.  @flynntaggart1820  Cool comeback, bruh. What you're doing is akin to going to Arlington Cemetery and kicking over markers. And yet you seem to think that it somehow "honors" the men who fought. And your only response to "what you are doing is wrong because..." is "you must be fun at parties", as if my abhorrence at your farcical mockery of war had any bearing on my social life whatsoever.
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  37.  @scottdunkirk6710  What, 27 years without a combat deployment got you looking for the next best thing? You're way off. My unit? I was a rifleman at Twentynine Palms, CA. I was with one of the battalions stationed there - one of the ones under the 7th Marine Regiment. That is, either 1/7, 2/7, 3/7, or 3/4.
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  38.  @scottdunkirk6710  Twentynine Palms is the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. When I was there (I got out in 2007), it was home to the 7th Marine Regiment (reinforced) - including 1st Tanks, 3rd LAR, a company of Amtracs, and 3/11, an artillery battalion, as well as a couple of Air Wing and FSSG units and the communications school. It's mainly a training base, mainside is small, but there are like 965 square miles of training ranges, including bombing ranges for aircraft. However, despite the consistent rumors when I was in, there were no manned aircraft stationed there. The Wing was at Miramar, with another base at Yuma, Arizona. There was a drone unit, VMU something, I don't remember the number. And I think there was some other unit that belonged to the Wing but didn't actually fly, but I don't know. I didn't know any Wing guys, everyone mostly just sticks to their own unit, unless you have a friend from boot camp or back home or something.
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  39.  @brano13177  I understand that that is your theory. It is also a facially ridiculous theory. To "provide...historical, social, and battlefield contexts...accurate as possible...in a safe, simulated environment" is not a realistic goal. Battlefield contexts and a safe environment are mutually exclusive ideas, full stop. When people do this satire and call it "reenactment", and claim that it helps them understand history, they are either (1) making thinly veiled excuses to play dress-up, or (2) lying to themselves. Getting a few hundred people with replica guns and uniforms to run around on a beach is not only an absurdly false impression of the Normandy landings, it also strips the landings themselves of the wider context of Operation Overlord, and the even wider context of World War II entirely. It ignores literally all of the feats of intelligence, deception, logistics, and engineering required to pull off such a massive invasion. It ignores the historically large invasion fleets, the temporary ports built to bring in the countless tons of equipment and additional personnel after the initial wave, the modifications done to tanks to allow them to land, etc. It ignores the defenses - the concrete bunkers, the flooded fields, the artillery, etc. It takes one aspect of the invasion - the actual landings - and removes them from all context. Now, that we've cleared up what it does to context, let's talk about the part that it does show. And how this is the part that transcends bad history and ventures well into the territory of disrespectful to the point of obscenity. You want to reenact a battle, but in a safe environment. The inherent contradiction there ought to be enough to put you off it, but apparently it isn't. So you take the superficial aspects of history - literally clothes and equipment - get those painstakingly correct, and then send people off willy-nilly like children playing army, shooting blanks at each other. This is not, and cannot be, an even remotely accurate portrayal of what a battle is like. It removes all the essence of a battle, the parts that make combat combat. It's equivalent of showing hardcore pornography on network television. If you show hardcore porn on network TV, with the requisite censorship, the people watching will see a very poorly acted story of a repairman going on a call to an unusually attractive housewife. That, obviously, misses the point entirely. And that's what these "reenactments" are - poorly acted amateur theater, without the important scenes. People who actually value and appreciate history don't mock the men who fought in battles like this. They read books, they visit battlefields, they collect artifacts - some even delve into research of primary sources and write books of their own. I own two rifles that were used in WWII - a Mauser Kar98K made in 1937 in Berlin and captured on the Eastern Front, and an SMLE Rifle No.1 Mk III* manufactured in 1916 which, unfortunately, isn't in as good condition as the Mauser and I don't know nearly as much of the history of. I'm always in the market for more WWII military firearms as well. Now, these aren't the best guns anymore by any means. I could get a Savage that costs less and shoots better, and is in a more readily available (and cheaper) caliber. But I treasure these old rifles for the history behind them. That does not mean that I'm about to dress up as Tommy Atkins of the Royal Fusiliers and pretend I'm in some battle that I wasn't. Nor will I be dressing up as (whatever the German equivalent of Tommy Atkins is) and playing at some other battle. The rifles themselves have history behind them. Some asshole in a costume holding them wouldn't. People who appreciate and value history wouldn't go so far out of their way to obfuscate history and hinder the understanding of history for the sake of a day of fun. People who honor the men who fought in these battles wouldn't dare satirize them as these people do.
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  40.  @gyanko8147  The amount of research becomes entirely irrelevant the minute they start playing army. It doesn't matter how much you research the correct belt buckle for a given unit during a specific period when you then start running around shooting fake guns at each other and pretending it's a "battle". Making sure your haircut is period appropriate based on whatever regulation you managed to dig up makes no difference when you're making the worst day of someone's life into a day of fun. I doubt that you know any veterans who do this nonsense, and I seriously doubt that there are many actual veterans doing it at all - maybe a couple of peacetime "veterans" who feel some kind of shame about never having fought, and make fools of themselves like this to try and "atone" for that, but based on every combat veteran I know, myself included, I can't imagine that any of them would want anything to do with this farce.
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  41.  @gyanko8147  Demonstrating equipment is very different from these fake "battles". I have no problem with that at all, especially when it comes to unfamiliar equipment from ancient/medieval armor to WWII vehicles. What I have a problem with is the fake battles, which cancel out any historical/educational value the rest of it may have. When you say "as accurate of an experience as possible", I cringe. Any accuracy involved in these things is entirely superficial. By its very nature, it entirely misses the essence of what combat is. Guys running around dressed in period costumes in more or less the same patterns that the actual soldiers in the battle they're satirizing ran around in misses the point entirely. There isn't a respectful, accurate way of "recreating" battles that could be considered even remotely legal or ethical, to say nothing of "safe". The fact that these farcical "battles" are juxtaposed with some actual historical research only makes them worse - it gives some kind of legitimacy to something that deserves none. "This is how this piece of gear is used, and this is the story of the campaign that the unit I'm representing was involved in, and....hold on, gotta go....BANG BANG BANG you're dead, Tommy! Nuh uh, you missed me! Dude, I like, totally shot you, quit cheating! Yeah, we'll definitely go get a beer later, but now you're supposed to be dead, 'member?" It's a bad joke. It's turning history into amateur theater, and sanitizing it so heavily as to give entirely false impressions.
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  42.  @gyanko8147  Not sure why the interest in NBC gear, but hey, to each his own. I considered it absolutely useless garbage that was there mostly to provide a false sense of security. If it starts raining VX gas and you're in combat gear (1) you aren't getting your mask on in time, and (2) that shit will get on your skin and kill you anyway. For NBC gear to work, you basically have to be in full MOPP before you get gassed. Obviously, nobody is advocating what amounts to murder for the sake of entertainment. But since that option is clearly off the table, you shouldn't do these battles at all. The impression that people get from them is so entirely removed from the realities of combat as to render them farce and satire far more than anything that could reasonably be called history. I've seen these reenactors. I thought it was kinda a cool idea before I did. Then I saw a bunch of middle-aged men (and women!) dressed up in WWII uniforms - and looking like a bunch of clowns in costumes more than soldiers. They knew less about the weapons than I did - and I'm more of a casual enthusiast when it comes to WWII weapons than an actual expert. Basically, they gave the appearance of fools who were out of their depth and didn't realize that they were embarrassing themselves, despite the fact that they had some cool toys, some Jeeps and I think a halftrack.
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  43.  @gyanko8147  Some movies are bad, this is true. Fury wasn't great. But a battle well done on film does a far better job than reenactors for a number of reasons - First, they have an effects budget. Like, a legit one, not "we'll pop a couple of squibs". It means that they can show things like artillery, air, and most importantly, casualties. Second, that effects budget can be used to either show the proper scale of the battle (though some movies, notably Dunkirk, fail at this) or it can show an extremely localized version, where the scale isn't relevant. Reenactment fails miserably at both of these. Also, the quality of actors is a relevant difference. In a well acted war movie, I believe that the guys on the screen are actual soldiers, not just Hollywood poofs. These reenactors, on the other hand, well, they look like dentists and accountants and various other well-to-do, middle class folks recreating. Basically, it looks more like an alternative to golf than an actual military anything. Sure, movies will invariably get things wrong. But if well done, they can also get a lot of things very, very right. And frankly, something like the exact manual of arms for the MG42 is significantly less important than the overall look and feel of combat. And you'll likely find that in actual combat use, the exact manual of arms was likely tossed out, and probably never really read in the first place. Based on my own military experience, field manuals and reality are two very, very different things. As for maps and the written word, this is how people have been understanding battles for thousands of years. We have a good idea of what happened at Actium without building a bunch of replica triremes and crashing about the Mediterranean.
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  44. It does all of this without any of the sacrifices and almost none of the difficulty. The similarities between this nonsense and actual war are superficial to the point of being meaningless. This is well-off, mostly middle-aged men (and even some women) partaking in an activity that they enjoy for fun. War is nothing like that. War is young men far from home, tired, hungry, and dirty. War isn't fun. It's mostly boredom, with bits of terror thrown in for good measure. War is life or death. War involves real hardship. This nonsense is to war what a weekend camping trip is to a hunter-gatherer society.
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  45.  @conversationtosaurusrex  No, I didn't miss the point. This has nothing to do with going to actual war. Nothing at all. It's significantly less realistic than, for instance, paintball, where at least people are actually shooting at each other. Saying that it's the closest thing to going to war is like saying that climbing a ladder is the closest thing to flying. There are a few superficial similarities, but the differences are far, far greater than the similarities. And the fact that people say "this is the closest thing" defeats any educational advantage that those superficial similarities might have brought. There is no good "closest thing" to war. War is like nothing else. The closest civilian analog I can think of - which is still nowhere near close - is football. You play a game of giving and taking ground, a physical game where there's a good chance of getting hurt, where the object is to impose your own will on the other team....that's as close as it gets. And even then, the stakes are nowhere near the same, and everyone gets to take a shower and get a hot meal after it's all over. This nonsense is dressing up and playing army. It's LARPing. Saying that this is at all close to actual war is akin to saying that putting on a suit and sitting at a desk is kinda like being President of the United States.
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  46.  @conversationtosaurusrex  Go hiking or plan a party. There, you got your carrying heavy shit and your small scale logistics down. It's you who misses the point here. This isn't just not exactly like war, it isn't even anything close to an acceptable facsimile. It's literally just playing dress up. These people go through none of the hardships that soldiers do. The fact that you're claiming that they do only makes my point.
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  47.  @conversationtosaurusrex  Yes, and in saying that, you are missing the point entirely. They are not experiencing any of the hardships. None. They are playing. They aren't doing a 25 mile hump with crew served weapons. They aren't waiting around until 2200 for sight counts to be secured. They aren't doing any of the generally tedious and unpleasant things that soldiers do. They're camping out with their friends and playing. This isn't even apples and oranges, it's apples and buckshot. There is no similarity here whatsoever.
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  48.  @conversationtosaurusrex  "The terrain". Camping with your friends for a weekend is not a hardship. If you think it is, you don't understand the very concept of hardship. This is people having fun outdoors. Lots of people like to do that. It isn't hardship at all. If you think that this is at all the kind of hardships involved in daily military life - much less actual war - you are entirely wrong. This is play. Recreation, not hardship at all. They're all there because they want to be. Nobody will throw them in prison, take away their money, or otherwise make their lives worse if they don't show up. They can leave anytime they want. They're camping out, showing off, pretending, and generally playing. There's no dickhead 1stSgt - maybe someone who pretends to be one, but if he annoys you, you can say "fuck off, Jimmy" and there's nothing he can do about it. There's no dopey incompetent lieutenant giving stupid orders which have the force of law. There's no grueling, repetitive training (or any training at all from the looks of it). They can camp out in tents if they like doing that, or stay at a hotel if they don't. They can eat whatever slop from the "field kitchen" if they want, or they can run off and grab a sandwich - and if they do choose the slop, it's because it's new and adventerous. Hell, most people who don't have to eat MREs on a daily basis actually like them, and I guarantee whatever they're whipping up is better than that shit. Physicality and being outdoors aren't hardship. They're fun. The aspects of military life that makes military life hard are all entirely absent from these events.
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  49.  @conversationtosaurusrex  I'm not making assumptions. I am a veteran. I served in the Marine Corps and I fought in Iraq. I understand military life. I've also seen these knuckleheads playing army. The similarities between the two end at the outfits and equipment.
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  50.  @conversationtosaurusrex  No. It's playing. Doing things that are, at most, very superficially similar to military training for fun. I like hiking through the woods. I like shooting guns. I like camping. And I served in the military. And you know what? Hiking through the woods has almost zero similarity to a military hump. Going to the range and shooting guns with my friends has very little similarity to training ranges or qualification ranges in the military. Camping has very little similarity to bivouacking in the military. The fact that you think they're similar just goes to show that you don't understand what military life, military training, and military deployments are like.
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