BY KAREN SAMPLES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
FORT THOMAS -- He survived all the shooting without a scratch, and he's not yet fainted from heat exhaustion. You'd think this would be a pretty good day for Bernie O'Bryan.
Unfortunately, a few details are amiss.
His shirt bothers him: It's got plastic buttons, which weren't around in 1898. His satchel isn't right, either -- the latch should be on the inside, not out.
Then there's the small matter of his wife's shoes. Under her long, hooped skirt, she's wearing Reeboks.
Oops.
Well, no matter: We won the Spanish-American War, anyway, and Mr. O'Bryan can still have fun acting it out. That's what he was doing last weekend at Tower Park in Fort Thomas, where a handful of re-enactors gathered to celebrate the conflict's centennial with encampments and a staged skirmish or two.
"Dad got shot'
"Dad got shot yesterday," says Sarah O'Bryan, 12, from the edge of the action. Sweat beads on her upper lip as she watches her father fan out from his tent, call orders to his men and engage in gun battle with a Spaniard.
"He got shot four times last week," says Sarah's mother, Pam, from the lawn chair where she sits, waving a straw fan.
The two of them really aren't into reliving wars. But this is Mr. O'Bryan's only hobby, so several times a month they gamely climb into their hot, flower-covered dresses.
The previous event was a Civil War re-enactment in Georgetown. This is the war that most fascinates Mr. O'Bryan and many others. Every summer, some 20,000 Americans pull on the wool pants and long-sleeved jackets of the Rebel and Union armies, dangle supplies from their belts and run around shooting blanks at each other.
The most dedicated of these men are vividly portrayed in journalist Tony Horwitz's new book, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.
Wandering the South in search of evidence that the war still matters, Mr. Horwitz found "hard-cores" who not only dress like Johnny Reb but try to eat, talk and sleep like him.
On a winter weekend, they might walk to the point of exhaustion, eat salt pork and sleep huddled together on the cold, hard ground. This gives them something called "period rush."
Mr. O'Bryan, 46, just has fun.
Although Kentucky was a slave state, two-thirds of its soldiers fought for the Union. One hundred thirty years later, he's happy to be one of them.
The more fanatical re-enactor -- preoccupied with states' rights, slavery and the glory of the Old South -- is generally fighting on the other side.
At one battle, "a fellow from South Carolina was just going on about how slavery really wasn't such a big deal -- and this man was serious," Mr. O'Bryan recalls. "We were like, "OK. Why don't you try it for a few years and see what you think?' "
A mild-mannered computer consultant from Covington, Mr. O'Bryan lives firmly in the present, despite his dismay over plastic buttons and non-period satchels. When not re-enacting, he drinks Sprite, watches television and generally appreciates modernity.
He doesn't love guns -- doesn't even own any, other than a few historical replicas that won't fire. For him, the joy of re-enacting is partly in its authentic details -- the uniforms, eating utensils, battle commands -- that help him understand history better and appreciate his ancestors more.
Take the Union soldier's jacket. Hanging in a closet in the summer of 1998, it looks impractical. But put it on and you'll understand: Wool holds up well when its wearer has to crawl on the ground or run through trees. In back, the jacket has two extra humps of material. Mr. O'Bryan quickly discovered these aren't whims of fashion; they hold his artillery belt in place.
"Sometimes we get the opinion we're a lot smarter than they were in the olden times, but I don't think so," he says.
For Civil War re-enacting, he's a member of the Fifth Ohio Light Artillery, which was a real unit in the Union Army. Now it fires unloaded cannons in fake battles around the Midwest.
Big events can be chaos, Mr. O'Bryan says. Officers shout confusing orders, Confederates unleash the Rebel yell and men are tempted to fall out of line.
Sometimes accuracy suffers, because nobody wants to die.
"If people are firing at each other for half an hour, and nobody gets wounded, and they're both standing out in the open, you're not being very realistic," Mr. O'Bryan says. "And if you're too realistic, you're going to shock people, and you may actually scare little kids."
Sunday's skirmish in Fort Thomas was a mild affair. Only a handful of men participated. The Civil War being far more popular, it was tough to find re-enactors with the right uniform for 1898.
As guns went pop-pop in the afternoon heat, Mrs. O'Bryan chatted with other spectators and furiously waved her fan.
How does this skirmish compare with the Civil War? I ask.
"It isn't much different," she says. "War is war, you know."
Karen Samples is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. Her column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. She can be reached at 578-5584 or email
her at ksamples@enquirer.com
SAMPLES ARCHIVE