Reenactor – Rose Johnson

October 1, 2024

He woke early. 6:00 am on the dot, muster time as far as any surviving records could indicate. Brief shower, coffee out of the Vollrath (wrong war, wrong service, but it wasn’t impossible one had been used, and it was one of the nicest antiques he’d ever managed to scrounge up). Today he pulled on the cotton Type-III. It was the most era-appropriate, even if he preferred the old clipped pockets on the Type-II. Frustratingly few people had ever worn the damn thing, confined as its production had been to a single year. He briefly considered adding a few more idiosyncrasies to his identity; leaning into the Vollrath and envisioning himself as a young volunteer, drawn to the service by his father’s stories of island-hopping adventure and carrying a case of antiques in his personal effects. His commanding officers would have been furious, but his exemplary record in the field would have granted him a certain leeway in his dress and kit. He’d gotten to the point of throwing a cavalry saber across his waist (it could have been a great-grandfather’s, worn during the closing days of the old American Civil War) when he finally junked the idea. It seemed too perverse, nesting anachronisms within themselves.
        He breached the front door an hour later, secure in the clean exactitude of an unadorned serviceman’s OG-107 with every piece period-accurate; carefully disheveled and rumpled to indicate a few days spent in the field. He was back in Saigon now, by necessity doing some shopping to replace the blown gasket in his commander’s jeep. He was bored, by this point, of casting himself as a mechanic directly, but three days a week he still found that he had to contrive reasons for the soldier he embodied to be assigned some sort of repair duty. The spare apartment was free, as was a generous supply of meal tokens, but antiques and miniatures were luxuries still bought with whatever was left of the expedient cash economy. It was easy enough to envision himself deep in the guts of a huey or the engine bell of a Selenic Combat Craft while servicing a mid-sized electric sedan or an industrial lift-suit. Wars before the Industrial Revolution were pretty much impossible to re-enact on workdays, although once, while tensioning the artificial muscle strands underneath a particularly strange all terrain walker, he’d managed to envision himself as an enlightened Roman surgeon charged with saving the life of a mad emperor’s favorite horse. Today’s excursion, however, did not require such an advanced level of abstraction.
        Although he came downtown often, he’d only gone to Saigon once before. He’d been on the other side then, an NLF guerilla in civilian clothes. A rural schoolteacher, she’d been ambivalent about the war until a distant American bomber uprooted most of her family tree. He’d been proud of the makeup, still had the various pads and the fake breasts tucked away behind the uniforms in his closet, waiting for the next time the mood struck. He’d liked the experience, enjoyed the challenge of playing nervous in a way that bordered on mysterious. Maybe that’s what Lawrence had liked about her, too. Goddamnit. Next time he went female, he’d go for something a little more authoritative, he decided. Maybe one of those evangelical fighter pilots from the fractured administration period, all bleach-blond hair and messianic certainty. Something to keep him from getting involved again. Wasn’t right, anyway, starting relationships within the unit. Bad for cohesion.
        Sex, of course, was fine. Letting off a little steam in the base camp showers was an activity so common across the armies of history that he never had trouble fitting it into any time period. As he handed over a few hard earned bills of fraying paper money to the man selling specialty auto parts, he recalled the single, fumbling assignation they’d had in the bathroom of one of the cities few clubs. It hadn’t been Saigon at the time, had in fact been the bombed-out district of Yerevan after the brief Armenian Nuclear Exchange. He’d been a fresh recruit, and the merchant (he couldn’t recall if he’d ever learned the man’s name) had been a cynical older officer. He hadn’t told the man the role he’d been cast in, not precisely, although he seemed to take to it fairly well regardless. Though they’d parted ways amicably, neither had left the encounter with any real feelings besides the memory of a pleasant afterglow. That was how things were supposed to go. Lawrence had been a mistake. A mistake he had to stop thinking about. Something that risked distracting him from the mission.
        The mission, right. It was 1969. As soon as the jeep got fixed he’d be out on patrol again, searching for sappers at an FSB in the middle of nowhere. Of course, it seemed like no one really cared about that kind of thing these days. Half the boys in his unit (the number wasn’t supported by any hard data he could find, but seemed anecdotally appropriate) were more focused on finding new things to smoke and idly discussing what might be thrown into the seargent’s tent than on looking for the enemy. He still took patrol seriously, but he knew it was only a matter of time before the malaise infected him too, before he realized how much easier it would be to hide somewhere near base camp and radio in that he’d swept the whole area, that things were fine, honestly. No enemy sighted. They weren’t going to win this thing anyway, what could it possibly matter. They hid so well, he thought, fondly remembering his time as Adrienne. The french name wasn’t one she’d been given at birth, but instead one she’d taken while in the city to give strength to her cover. He considered whether he might have met her, but the timeline simply didn’t add up. She’d died in the May Offensive. He, as he was now, had been deployed in September. Goddamnit Private. Focus.
        One single lapse in attention and OPFOR would be on his ass in a heartbeat. The enemy could be behind any building, in any forest, under any debris. Around any corner. Shopping, even, at that stall over there. Hair still as beautiful as the last time he’d seen it, at that bar out in the newbuild suburbs where he’d lived. At any moment ready to turn around and spot the six foot four 28 year old in the antique fatigues, awkwardly toting an orange-tipped M-16 over a shopping bag full of brake cleaner and frustratingly niche washers. But he wasn’t turning. not yet. Still time to sneak past, initiate evasive maneuvers. He didn’t have to meet the enemy on the battlefield, didn’t have to look Lawrence in the eye and watch again that disappointed stare. Watch the most beautiful man he’d ever met realize for the third time that not only had the woman, the person he’d loved for those six months died, she’d never really existed at all. Watch those well-muscled shoulders tense with the anticipation of having to talk, yet again, with a new recruit. A new fiction, expertly realized by a poorly-socialized mechanic who, after half a year of bliss, had suddenly become a stiff and aristocratic tank commander determined to root out separatist rancher militias in the Owyhee desert. Who had again changed into a loudmouthed orbital bomber repairman, had each time felt the need to treat Lawrence as a different person, try to fold him into his or her ever-changing war effort in a million ways until unit cohesion simply broke down.
        He pulled the collar high and marched on, eyes straight ahead. Whether Lawrence turned around was irrelevant. Mickey fucking mouse club. By next month he’d be someone else. Maybe a Carthaginian auxiliary. Maybe a Byzantine general, standing on the wall and watching the turks wheel out some newfangled siege contraption. Maybe one of the old American army’s last holdout units, in the closing days of the war that truly ended all wars. Huddled up in a bunker. Eating canned tuna and waiting for something new.