BOALSBURG, Pa. — The dirt paths that lead to Alpha Company’s field headquarters are lined with overgrown grass and weeds. A canvas tent is protected by machine guns, sandbags and Army-green storage boxes. And lurking somewhere outside is the enemy: the Viet Cong.
But these aren’t the jungles of southeast Asia, just the woods of small-town Pennsylvania, where more than 30 years after the fall of Saigon, military enthusiasts are beginning to re-enact the Vietnam War.
For decades, re-enactors have played out key events in the Revolutionary or Civil wars. Now they are illustrating one of the nation’s most controversial conflicts — and paying tribute to veterans.
“We do it to honor these guys and to tell them, ‘You weren’t forgotten,’ to tell them it wasn’t always negative,” said Tom Gray, 47, of Altoona, who played a platoon leader at the encampment outside the Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg, about 120 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.
Vietnam re-enactors have no national organization, but participants say Vietnam War groups are popping up around the country. Events were staged earlier this year in Houston and Jackson, Miss. Fort Harrison State Park in Indiana held a Vietnam-era “tactical demonstration” last month.
Wilbur Smith, a 61-year-old postal worker, was among the 100 or so first-day visitors at the Boalsburg bivouac. That’s a fraction of the thousands who are drawn to the annual Gettysburg re-enactment each summer.
“What they’re doing here is absolutely great,” said Smith, who lives in Mount Union, about 50 miles west of Harrisburg, and spent a year in Vietnam as an Army sergeant in 1968 and 1969.
“I think for a long time with Vietnam, we tried to push that out of our history, that it didn’t happen, so I think this is a good thing.”
Museum educator Joe Horvath, a Navy veteran himself from the early 1980s, helped organize the first bivouac two years ago. Horvath said he was initially wary of the reaction the event might receive from veterans, but the response has been so positive that a second day was added to the schedule this year.
On a recent morning, Horvath darted around the grounds to help set the scene: Speakers needed hooking up to blare period recordings of Armed Forces musical and news broadcasts; the medical and operations tents needed organizing; and signs needed to be posted.
“Caution! Bad Guys Ahead!” read one sign posted on an overgrown path that would be used by a Vietnam patrol led by Gray — the highlight of the afternoon.
A business owner by day, Gray looked the part of a platoon sergeant. He was dressed in fatigues, smoke grenades hanging from his body, and carrying a sidearm and bayonet strapped to his legs.
The mission: a long-range patrol into the “jungle” path to gather intelligence on the enemy. About 80 onlookers watched from the clearing as the patrol entered the woods. The crowd listened as dispatches from a civilian narrator and Gray were transmitted over speakers.
“Vietnam was a different war, a guerrilla war,” Horvath told them. “Once you entered, everywhere around you was a killing zone.”
Gray and his men remain quiet once the patrol starts, though they cannot control the sounds of laughing children at a museum picnic area beyond the trees.
Six minutes later, gunfire erupts. “How many?” Gray shouts. The soldier on point spots three “enemy fighters” — though those re-enactors cannot be seen from beyond the thicket of brush and woods.
Some of Gray’s men fire back as the rest of the platoon kneels, shielded by the maze of trees and undergrowth.
“White 1, White 1, this is Red 6,” Gray yells into a cell phone that doubles as the radio after their actual radio broke down just before the patrol. “Enemy contact, enemy contact. Small amount.”
Gray orders his soldiers to turn back before another exchange of gunfire. After 15 minutes, the patrol is over. Gray’s group is short a couple re-enactors, so they cancel a scene in which a soldier gets wounded and must be treated in the field.
Smith approved of the mock patrol — even though the firefight was no comparison to the battles of 1968. He planned to return next year and check out other commemorations in the region.
The re-enactments can “help people forget the pain even. To hide it, it stays in here,” Smith said, pointing a finger to his chest. “That’s hard. I think this is good.”
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