Leaving Mundania

by Lizzie Stark

Playing War

  Everything boils down to war for Jeffrey Mclean. It is the common denominator of history for him, the core act that defines the world we live in. Jeff studies it now as a college student, but as a veteran, he lived it for more than a decade. And he’s spent most of his life playing war as a larper and a World War II reenactor. War, for Jeff Mclean, is an inevitable consequence both of history and of leisure.

  The collusion between Jeff’s real and fantasy lives is not unusual in larp, where some aspect of the player appears in every character and the game world always mirrors facets of the world we live in. Occasionally this leads to explosive situations, as in the case of Lady Nina’s trial, but more often the mixture of the real and fantastical is a good thing, proving that larp can be more than an escape or vacation from real life, more than a flimsy shell behind which a player hides his or her true intentions. Sometimes, larp is a profound expression of identity, a vehicle for self-discovery, and a therapeutic outlet.

  As a child in suburban New Jersey, Jeff and his neighborhood friends would get together and declare, “Let’s play war.” Kids with fatigues would put them on, and they’d creep through the woods with their toy guns, shouting “bang bang” at one another. The wounded dropped to the ground and counted to sixty before rising miraculously to rejoin the fight. When his dad brought home a set of big boxes, Jeff used the cardboard to make a helmet, shield, and sword covered with duct tape. They weren’t very realistic, but Jeff played knight with them, pretending to be a hero.

  Around age ten or eleven, he began playing D&D, and a few years later he started his lifetime love affair with miniature war gaming, a style of game in which players pit armies of tiny figurines against one another on a game terrain. Jeff particularly enjoyed painting his own figurines, finding satisfaction in assembling his own army. In his early teens he played paintball and laser tag, which tapped into something written into his own DNA, the desire to become a soldier. With so many gaming hobbies, it was perhaps inevitable that Jeff would become a larper. When he was fifteen or sixteen, with a head full of J. R. R. Tolkien and the old movie Excalibur, he visited his local hobby shop and picked up a black-and-white pamphlet for NERO NJ. His first character was a warrior, and he arrived at the game looking for an authentic medieval atmosphere. Like so many other larpers, his first event hooked him. He couldn’t describe quite why. Larp for Jeff was the roar of the crowd for a basketball player or the quiet of the woods for a hunter—something about the atmosphere drew him, made him feel this game was the real thing, not a mere dress rehearsal. As a kid he’d always wanted to be a hero, and now, as a warrior at a larp, he had the chance.

  NERO, which later became LAIRE, introduced Jeff to the larp scene and its denizens, people he’d still be hanging out with years later. The future founders of Knight Realms played in the same game and floated on the periphery of Jeff’s social circle. The high school-aged Jeff was a shy wallflower, and the way the larp forced him to interact with so many people, even to speak publicly on occasion, changed him. He became more outgoing, brash even, and comfortable improvising. He landed a role entertaining people at a local Renaissance Faire. Most importantly, though, through LAIRE Jeff acquired a circle of close friends. For a time they played a crew of evil knights—Jeff always preferred to play someone with a clear set of values, whether a good guy or a villain. Villains were easier, since they didn’t have to follow so many rules. Jeff and his friends didn’t do the bad guy thing halfway—at one point, they ganked the entire town.

  Jeff didn’t slack on costuming either. In the 1980s and 1990s, he says, players could assemble high-quality costuming—fake scars, cloth tabards, and fancy worked belt pouches—to express their character concepts. They could make everything appear authentic down to the smallest detail, but they’d still be walking around with homemade boffers, plumbing supplies covered with duct tape. It just didn’t look right. Today players buy much of their costuming and weapons through eBay, boutique websites, and Etsy, but back then, in the early days of larp, during the Internet’s infancy, such sites were years away. Then his friend found an ad for foam latex weapons in a magazine and ordered a sword from Europe to see what it looked like. While it wasn’t up to today’s standards of realism, Jeff says, it seemed awesome compared to what they had. Very sword-like. They sparred a little with the new weapon—a hit tingled more than one performed with a boffer, but not too badly. Over the next few years, Jeff cruised some nascent websites, and he bought a latex sledgehammer, which he showed to James, who agreed to allow its use at Knight Realms, which Jeff and his friends began attending in 1998. Jeff thought to himself, Damn. I want to see what they do for every type of weapon. His apartment became a veritable storeroom; he bought daggers, hammers, maces, pole arms, staffs, bows, even throwing daggers.

  The same heroic impetus that drew Jeff into larp also helped drive him to join the army. At the time, it seemed like the natural next step to him. He had a strong military tradition in his family. Every male relative he had had served in the military for at least a couple years. Jeff thought of the military as a place where he could learn morals and develop a work ethic, a place that would help him mature, give him a focus and direction. At eighteen, he didn’t feel ready for college and was all set to enlist, but an accidental knee injury kept him from joining until two years later, in 1995 at age nineteen. He bucked family tradition by enlisting in the army—most of his relatives had joined the air force or navy. In retrospect, he says he was naive about what it meant to be a soldier. Many people who served in the 1980s never saw combat.

  Although he began in an armored unit, Jeff soon switched to Explosive Ordnance Disposal, or EOD, essentially the army’s bomb squad. These troops neutralize bombs, land mines, and other explosives. After Jeff switched fields, he discovered that his grandfather had worked in a similar unit, defusing underwater bombs during World War II. In 2000, after five years in the army, Jeff wanted to use the skills he’d spent so long practicing, to prove to himself that he could do the job he’d been training for. The army tries to mimic reality, but like all simulations, it fell short. Some of his instructors had been in Operation Desert Storm and had advice and observations about how it would or wouldn’t be in the field, but Jeff wanted to witness the reality himself. He switched into a new EOD unit that was deploying on a peacekeeping mission to Kosovo, during which he got his first real taste of war. He remembers visiting a Serbian base on top of a hill and observing the bunkers below—there were about twenty of them, each one bombed out, with a hole in its roof. His team helped keep the roads clear of mines and submunitions—the components of cluster bombs that scatter on impact—dealt with old weapons caches, and marked minefields. His team blew them up in situ or collected weapons for detonation elsewhere.

  Kosovo was his first of four deployments. He went to Afghanistan in 2002, in the wake of the September 11 attacks. His unit ended up supporting Special Forces, which meant he got to see the countryside and interact with locals, in part because Special Forces were helping train the Afghan army. He saw combat. He helped deal with huge caches of weapons the Russians left after the Soviet Union disintegrated in the 1980s and stuff left over from when the Mujahedeen fought them. He saw rooms full of twenty thousand mortars that almost overwhelmed him. He saw a lot of things. He doesn’t like to talk about it. An April 21, 2003, Army News Service article about three EOD technicians and a Special Forces soldier killed in an explosion on the job quotes Jeff, who helped dispose of the fatal cache a year after the accident, as saying, “Everyone felt their loss. We’re a very tight-knit community so when someone dies in the line of duty, their name doesn’t just go on the memorial. We all remember them, whether we knew them from school or through friends.”

  When he returned home in 2003, he and his wife, whom he had married before his first deployment, divorced. In 2004 he deployed to Afghanistan again, destroying more weapons caches and working with the marines, and then in 2006 he had his fourth deployment, this time to Baghdad, w
here his team did a lot of post-blast analysis of destroyed vehicles.

  Throughout all these deployments, Jeff always returned to his home larp, Knight Realms. His friends played a family of good-aligned paladins, the Tellinghasts, who were dedicated to the in-game deity Valos, the god of justice. Jeff played Aradiel Tellinghast, a knight templar of the church, a heroic character bound by the rules of morality. One of Jeff’s friends says that Aradiel is Jeff, but better, something Jeff takes as a compliment. Aradiel had to go, though. Somewhere around Jeff’s second or third deployment, the character became less fun. The fantasy world echoed the reality Jeff experienced during deployment. Certain aspects of the character—the way he stood in a doorway, protecting a family, for example—roused unpleasant feelings in Jeff, memories that he didn’t care to relive. Aradiel, as a dedicated Valosian, saw the world in black and white and made decisions based on the courage of those convictions rather than on facts. Aradiel tended toward zealotry, and Jeff had seen the effects of zealotry firsthand. At first he didn’t understand why the game suddenly created uncomfortable feelings in him. It took him a while to acknowledge that he had PTSD and to receive treatment for it. He mostly stopped playing Aradiel because he didn’t want such terrible feelings to infringe on his fun.

  The feelings, Jeff says, are the most real things about the fantasy fights that take place in Knight Realms. Boffer battles hint at the reality of combat: the anxiety that unknown bad guys wait quietly in the darkness, the adrenaline rush of danger, the flash of brotherly love that pushes one’s body out of the attacking line after a friend falls, and the momentary emotions of doubt and loathing as the enemy rushes forward. While the quality of emotions might be similar, the intensity isn’t. Boffer battles provide the sort of rush that a scary movie might, the secondhand rush of someone safe in a theater seat; the battles are only a taste, a pale reflection of what it means to have your own life and the lives of your compatriots on the line. At the end of the day, Jeff said, larp is imaginary combat. There might be bitter emotions about who got “killed,” but nobody dies, and there’s no blood.

  When Jeff returned from his first deployment to Afghanistan, he became interested in World War II. He watched Saving Private Ryan and Steven Spielberg’s TV miniseries Band of Brothers. These weren’t his childhood war movies—they didn’t show the Hollywood glamour of war; they showed the nitty-gritty dark emotional stuff, the complexity of what happens to soldiers during combat. There is no closer bond than the one between people who have held each other’s lives in their hands, Jeff says. For the first time, he began to relate to the individual soldiers portrayed on screen. He started to study World War II. It attracted him not simply because of the films made about it but because this war had it all: technical accomplishments, individual sacrifice, and epic proportions. It had a morality to it. Best of all, it was well-documented, with plenty of material available right down to the mundane details of life in that era, details Jeff could really sink his teeth into.

  Years later, after returning from Iraq—his fourth deployment—Jeff was stationed at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. Before he left for the South, he did some web searches for larps in the area but hadn’t found anything that wasn’t three or four hundred miles away from where he would be stationed. He decided to investigate World War II reenactment units on the Internet and found a lot of active groups near his base. He had to decide what sort of soldier he wanted to play, and initially he went for aesthetics. German SS soldiers are notorious of course, but they also had the sharpest-looking uniforms. Jeff dropped that idea after investigating the price of a basic “kit,” the minimum required costuming and props, which he estimated at $3,500. In addition to wanting a sharp uniform, Jeff didn’t want to play a run-of-the-mill soldier but someone with a unique and special job. He decided to play an American paratrooper. The kit was cheaper, since it was made of canvas instead of wool. A group at a nearby fort in Tennessee was reenacting the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, Dog Company, the same regiment that Band of Brothers had followed. Jeff joined up.

  Military reenactors from whatever era, be it Revolutionary War or World War II, participate in two basic types of formal event. Most obviously, they refight known battles in front of the general public; they are living history. Many reenactors also participate in improvised private battles, sometimes called “tacticals,” which have an outcome not determined by history. Tacticals are not open to the public and are akin to larp, with participants getting killed or injured based on the honor system. Like a boffer larp, Jeff says, some guys are there to fire blanks and act macho, but most are deeply into recreating the look and feel of a particular moment in time.

  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.