Vietnam Buffs Bring Jungle to Va.

The communists hung their hammocks a half-mile away, past several scorched acres of forestland leveled after a neighbor sold the timber. The burned stumps added a nice touch. "Looks like it's been napalmed," one guy said.

Gouge began unpacking his gear, including replicas of his father's dog tags and patches from other veterans. His reenactment unit is named in honor of the Army's 199th Light Infantry Brigade, the one his father served in, the one Gouge has written two books about.

"A lot of the [veterans] that I know, their own kids don't really care or don't take the time to talk to them about this," said Gouge, who sported a military buzz cut for the weekend. "I guess I'm the person for that."

On this weekend, about 20 people from North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia were doing "impressions" of Americans who fought in Vietnam. Several have military experience, including one Gulf War veteran. There are police officers, firefighters, a sheriff's deputy and a district attorney. A pediatric therapist came to play medic along with his wife. One man, a chemist, cooked meals in an antique field kitchen.

This is a fledgling endeavor, with the first units starting about five years ago. Several hundred people reenact the Vietnam War, with about a dozen units listed on the Internet. Their events generally are private affairs, and some participants say they're reluctant to tell too many outsiders for fear of stirring up the war's raw emotions.

In contrast, many Civil War reenactments are public; Gettysburg draws as many as 20,000 participants and spectators.

Most at the Virginia event know one another from other historical gatherings, chiefly for the Civil War and World War II. About four years ago, they started doing Vietnam.

They don't concern themselves with the politics of the war that still divides the United States 30 years after Saigon fell. They come as history buffs.

To them, this is a hobby, like golf or collecting model trains, but more educational. What some of them don't understand are "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" fans. If they're going to dress up, one reenactor asked, why not pick a real time period?

"People, they're so weird," Patrick Hubble said. "Unlike us."

Hubble, an affable mortician and former Navy sailor from Lynchburg, Va., plays a North Vietnamese soldier because he figures somebody has to do it. This time, he was leading a band of six enemy fighters. It's always hard to find people to be the bad guys, so the U.S. soldiers say that the enemy is so elusive that most are hidden in the forest.

Hubble, who gave his age as "born in 1968, year of the Tet Offensive," is always on the lookout for new recruits. Several times, he visited a Vietnamese-owned grocery store to ask if he could borrow the family's elder sons for a weekend. He showed them photos of himself dressed up as a communist.