Claustrophobia
I took my wife and daughters to see U.S. Army Heritage Day at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pa. My older daughter didn't want to go, insisting that it would be "boring," that greatest of sins to a teenager. But off we went.
The centerpiece of the Army Heritage Center is the Army Heritage Trail. You can see this anytime the center is open (oddly, it is open Monday-Friday from 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., but closed on weekends and federal holidays) but today there were re-enactors from most of the wars in which the United States was involved in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It could be disconcerting. You would emerge from the authentic World War I trenches and encounter soldiers from the Spanish-American War and French and Indian War. Walk on, and you're back in the Revolutionary War. Go further and you do a quick, Time Tunnel-like jump to World War II. Around the next bend a company of Civil War Zouaves prepared to fire off a volley.
I found the World War I trenches to be the most interesting. You read about them for years, but until you see them close up you can't quite understand how awful and claustrophobic they must have been. And of course, we saw them without the mud, blood, and rotting flesh.
Perhaps the best part of the day was when my older daughter confessed that the Army Heritage Trail was "quite interesting" and she was glad she came. I don't have it on tape, but she did say it.
