You’re With the Angels Now
Brian is a Civil War reenactor. In this photo, he’s ‘bleeding’ fake blood to make his wounds more realistic. In Oregon and Washington, most reenactments are put on by the Northwest Civil War Council. After battles—which can be incredibly violent, with cavalry charges, drawn sabers, cannons pounding, infantry firing powder charges at distances of less than 100 feet ... the wounded crawling across fields in front of hundreds of spectators, wailing, pleading for help—spectators sometimes get invited to go carry the wounded to aid stations. I haven’t seen the most gruesome form of moulaging (creating fake compound fractures, open abdominal wounds and the like), but I’ve been told that some reenactors use them to heighten the ‘drama.’
To say it’s surreal is ... surreal.
The reenactors take it seriously. There’s a lot of consideration put into equipment, clothing, replica firearms, accessories, manner of speech and conduct. Sew on a button with polyester thread and you’re condemned as a Farby—a sloppy reenactor who doesn’t have the proper respect for history. 
I once asked a Yankee, a former infantrymen in the real Army, why he got involved in reenactments. “To discourage people from enlisting,” he said. “This is as close as I can come to showing them how brutal it is.” But the majority of reenactors (I think it’s safe to say) want to resurrect a moment, a day, of history, and take great pains to do so authentically.
A group of spectators have carried Brian to a surgical tent. A spectator—a woman in a flowered dress and tennis shoes—who has her hands pressed against his chest, is crying. Maybe it’s the horror of it, in a time of real war. Maybe she’s thinking about the troops we’ve lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t know. Later this same day, another (Confederate) soldier will be charged with “fraternization with the enemy,” because he’s been seen holding the hand of a young woman, a Yankee, and will be tied to a tree and executed by firing squad. No one has explained to a child—another spectator—that’s it’s kind of an outdoor play, and that the priest who loudly administers last rights is really an accountant, or a bricklayer, or whatever he is in real life.
The priest stands aside. The soldier pleads for his life. The order is given. The bullets enter his body. His body wrenches with the violence of the impact. He slumps against the ropes.
And the girl begins screaming. She has her hands at her face. Pulling now at her hair. She doubles over. They come to her, too late—she’s seen him die, and it does little good, it seems, when they untie him and he walks away, and a few people clap. He’s a ghost, there in the whites of her eyes, still wild, still raining.
The woman presses her hands to Brian’s chest and she’s crying. She wipes her nose with the back of a hand and says, patting his hands now, patting his hands, “You’re with the angels now.”