The Death of Authenticity: “Cell Phones and Soda Cans Have Permanently Invaded”
Authenticity. Some folks have it, and they’re assholes that go out of their way to demean other reenactors about the color of their buttons.
I understand feeling like this. Sometimes the ole stitch Nazis can really get on your nerves. We go out for a weekend to have fun and they stand around criticizing everyone’s boot soles. It sucks, and there’s a time and place for constructive criticism.
More and more though, I wish there were a few more stitch Nazis roaming the grounds of living history events and tacticals alike. They seem to have disappeared, replaced by the most complacent, who gives a damn, hand me that Mountain Dew band of reenactors I’ve ever seen in my life.
It seems as if we’ve forgotten what made us want to do this hobby in the first place. So we could time travel to what we believe is the most interesting, devastating yet strangely beautiful time in our history. We love the 1940s. We love the music, the movies, the guns and the gear; everything about the era gives us a history boner.
So why then, when we get a chance to put on the uniforms and spend a weekend as close as we’ll ever get to stepping into George Luz’s long johns, do we sit on coolers covered in wool blankets sharing photos on Instagram and waiting till the sun goes down so we can sit around a fire and drink lukewarm bud light?
If I wanted to do that I’d befriend the hillbilly rednecks I went to high school with. I’m sure they’re in the middle of a cornfield right now tossing empty blue cans into a nearly out-of-control fire.
What’s the point? I mean honestly I’d like an answer here. If you’re not at least going to give authenticity the old college try, then why the fuck even be a part of the hobby?
And what happened to people being embarrassed of their authenticity mistakes? Everyone makes them and continues to make them. But 5 years ago at least people would acknowledge their mistakes and move forward. In 2016 it seems totally acceptable to use your smartphone just as you would in everyday life during events. No shame, no guilt, just Facebook.
I have a smartphone. I love my smartphone; the technology amazes me almost every day. But when I get to an event I shut it off. I understand if you need to have your phone on you incase of a family emergency, but if you can’t go 2 days without checking your Facebook or taking selfies then you need to have your fucking head examined.
So what happens now? Have smart phones become such a replacement for our personality that we can’t possibly be without them and therefore it’s completely OK to use them regularly at an event? I hope not.
Have we become so complacent with our hobby that we honest to goodness stop learning anything about the unit we portray and stop caring about how we portray them?
I’m seeing it happen all over the hobby. And the hobby is suffering because of it. Are your unit’s numbers down lately? I thought they might be……..
The stitch Nazis have died off and their return is nowhere in sight. We should all pray they come back before the hobby vanishes into the grey space somewhere between airsoft and cosplay.
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So why then, when we get a chance to put on the uniforms and spend a weekend as close as we’ll ever get to stepping into George Luz’s long johns, do we sit on coolers covered in wool blankets sharing photos on Instagram and waiting till the sun goes down so we can sit around a fire and drink lukewarm bud light?
If I wanted to do that I’d befriend the hillbilly rednecks I went to high school with. I’m sure they’re in the middle of a cornfield right now tossing empty blue cans into a nearly out-of-control fire.
What’s the point? I mean honestly I’d like an answer here. If you’re not at least going to give authenticity the old college try, then why the fuck even be a part of the hobby?
And what happened to people being embarrassed of their authenticity mistakes? Everyone makes them and continues to make them. But 5 years ago at least people would acknowledge their mistakes and move forward. In 2016 it seems totally acceptable to use your smartphone just as you would in everyday life during events. No shame, no guilt, just Facebook.
I have a smartphone. I love my smartphone; the technology amazes me almost every day. But when I get to an event I shut it off. I understand if you need to have your phone on you incase of a family emergency, but if you can’t go 2 days without checking your Facebook or taking selfies then you need to have your fucking head examined.
So what happens now? Have smart phones become such a replacement for our personality that we can’t possibly be without them and therefore it’s completely OK to use them regularly at an event? I hope not.
Have we become so complacent with our hobby that we honest to goodness stop learning anything about the unit we portray and stop caring about how we portray them?
I’m seeing it happen all over the hobby. And the hobby is suffering because of it. Are your unit’s numbers down lately? I thought they might be……..
The stitch Nazis have died off and their return is nowhere in sight. We should all pray they come back before the hobby vanishes into the grey space somewhere between airsoft and cosplay.
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I very much liked the first half of the movie. The love story is great and I felt really connected to Doss’ struggle. He was played so kind and soft spoken you couldn’t help but want him to win.
The first real cringe moment was his introduction to basic training. His platoon mates were each a walking cliché of WWII stereotypes. The good-looking “Hollywood,” the short little quedo, the asshole who for some reason always becomes the B.A.R. gunner.
Nothing that I didn’t expect though, so I put the cheesiness out of my mind and focused on the brilliance of Vince Vaughn as the grizzled NCO. His christening of the Pollack as “chief” was one of the funnier moments of any WWII movie I’ve ever seen.
I was anxious to get to the combat scenes. I’m not a movie critic in the faintest sense, but I do love reviewing authenticity and everything was so straightforward in the training scenes there wasn’t much to critique.
Yet when they actually jumped from stateside to overseas it left me confused. I realized there had been no timeline the entire movie, which left me with tons of questions. We jumped from an ambiguous time somewhere after Pearl Harbor to May 1945, three months before the war’s end. What happened in-between? Did he volunteer toward the end of the war or did his unit just spend 3 years getting ready to invade Okinawa? Were the C.O. and Vaughn veterans who had returned from overseas to train a new unit or was this their first action as well?
I had just barely recovered from this whirlwind when the first combat scene finally debuted, and punched me square in the jaw.
I saw the movie by myself, something I generally enjoying doing. But when I watched them try and take Hacksaw for the first time I wished someone I knew had been sitting next to me. It was horrific on a level I’d never seen before. I good friend of mine told me before I went to see it that it made ‘Private Ryan’ look like a kids movie. He was right. It was almost too much, visually. I couldn’t see what was happening in the hurricane of limbs and bayonets and mortar explosions. It really left me wondering if the battle had really been that bad. If there was that much hand to hand combat. I still don’t know, information on the actual battle has been hard to come by.
It was all very shocking and overwhelming. The only thing that pulled me out of the intensity was the asshole B.A.R. gunner picking up half a dead body and using it as his Captain America shield while he charged a group of japs. Why, Mel Gibson, why??
I shook my head at that, tried to forget about it and waded through the rest of the film. All in all I loved it. Minor authenticity mistakes here and there, (helmet liners, bayonet lugs and postwar sights) but nothing too egregious and nothing that took away from the power of the story.
That’s what really made this film worth watching. The pure power of Desmond Doss’ story. Is it the best war film since “Saving Private Ryan?”
No.
But a worthy effort by all involved and a wholly amazing story that needed to be told. 
I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like to fight in WWII. The pain and horror can only be understood by those who experienced it firsthand. But take all that suffering and death and throw sub zero temperatures, a foot of snow and blizzard condition winds on top of it and the scenario becomes unthinkably horrific. I’ve spent hours, days maybe, thinking about how any human being could endure those conditions. I still don’t know how anyone did it.
(Just for the record, I know conditions on the Eastern front were even worse, but I have little to know experience researching or reenacting it).
That’s what makes cold weather events so enticing to me. Spending 24 hours “living it” always leaves me in awe of how the real guys could’ve survived weeks in those conditions.
These events also allow me to “pull out all the stops” so to speak. Improvising with how to carry everything you need has always been one of my favorite parts of the hobby and it’s never more important than during a winter event.
This is made even more exciting by how ill prepared the allies were during this time. So often you see infantrymen carrying almost no gear, everything thrown in pockets or stuff down the front of a field jacket.
You also have to figure out how to carry your sleeping gear. I’d like to eventually work up to going without that but have never had the balls to venture out for a night without multiple wool blankets or a period bag carried in a hobo roll.
My unit does an overnight tactical in central Minnesota every December. We sleep in foxholes smack dab in the middle of a large stand of planted evergreens. I couldn’t imagine an area that looks more like Belgium if I tried.
The feeling I get when I’m there is amazing. It’s frightening actually, when you feel the cold setting in. You know that at least for the next 24 hours, there’s no way to get warm. No heaters, no campfires, no Gortex boots. “Deep cold” as I call it, cold that shakes you to your bones, is one of the worst feelings I’ve ever experienced.
The night after the event when I’m back home in my toasty warm bed I remember what that felt like and shudder. Then I realize for the real guys in the winter of 44-45, there was no warm bed to be had. They would still be out there for weeks, maybe months. And there’d be people trying to kill them. It’s at this very moment every year that my appreciation and amazement at what those men went through is at its highest level. And that makes it worth it.
Check out this video to take a look at the event we do every December!
This photo was brought to us by Alexander Bartoli. It features troops of the 2nd SS Das Reich Reconnaissance. Sturmmann Baumann is on the left, Schutze Graeber is on the right (Alexander Bartoli and Chris Williams in real life). The scenario for the photo is the two soldaten are taking a moment to chat 
Submitted by Wilhelm Gaulke, our 2nd place winner certainly doesn't look like an original photograph, but we couldn't overlook the quality and "epic-ness" of the shot (pardon the phrase). 
It can be one hell of a clustered mess and has prompted more than one angry conversation on who blew whose ear’s out, but with all the armor and those incredible pack guns the krauts bring out, it’s definitely a can’t miss. If you’re on the allied side, try your luck moving up the right side of the battlefield to grab the good cover near the WWI trenches. If your goal is to get in some amazing 
During the day with all the families, bratty school kids and pulled pork food-trucks it can be a little hard to really time travel to the 1940s in the tent city. Once the sun goes down and the lanterns come out..it’s another world. The darkness hides just enough of the non-period eye sores. Even if it’s out of your way, take a stroll down the main road and let it all soak in. The gravel crunching beneath your boots and the idol chatter of half-drunk figures casting shadows on dimly lit tent flaps can really make you believe you’re walking around a marshaling area in England about to move down to the coast and board that big boat across the channel.
