Modern-Day Veterans Step into Civil War Uniforms

Story by Gail Parsons

After spending more than 20 years in the military, two of Fort McAllister’s living historians have turned to teaching others about the veterans who came before them.

Jamie Niles started his 21-year career in the Marine Corps having enlisted in 1992 as an electronics technician for air traffic control. He served in Okinawa and as an embassy guard in Germany and Columbia before going to Pensacola, Florida, where he taught electronics for two years.

“When I was in Pensacola, I applied to Army Flight School, even though I was in the Marines,” he said. “I wanted to fly. I wanted to be a pilot. I tried doing that in the Marines, and they said no—three times. I had a good record and everything but the Marine Corps is tiny compared to the Army. Plus, they have fighter jets so it's a whole other level.”

Eight years after joining the Marines, Niles changed uniforms.

“One day I was a Marine, the next day I was Army,” he said.

He went on to Fort Rucker Army Flight School and eventually flew Blackhawk helicopters. Although he started as a Warrant Officer, he went to Officer Candidate School and retired from the Army as a captain. His last duty station was Hunter Army Airfield—the cost of living and the weather helped him make the decision to stay in Georgia rather than move back to his home state of Massachusetts.

Army veteran Cecil Greenwell retired at the rank of Sgt. First Class. His last 16 months in the Army were in Korea. As soon as he retired, he returned to Fort Stewart where he entered the civilian workforce. It was just over 21 years from the day he took his oath to defend the country.

Back in 1982, at the age of 22, he had a wife and a full-time job in Louisville, Kentucky but was starting to question what his future held. A series of events steered him to the Army.

First, one of his managers, whose wife also worked in his office, told him in passing how they hoped to someday be able to buy a house.

“There were two paychecks,” he said. “I’m like, ‘You’re the best guy they got and you’re hoping to buy a house?’ I knew then this was not going to work for me. In 1982, the economy was terrible.”

Around that time, his father died but before he did, he spoke of his one regret—that he never made it to Australia.

 “He told me, ‘If you want to do something, you better do it,’” he said.

At that point, all Greenwell knew was that he wanted to do something different than a dead-end job. Growing up in Louisville, he would hear the guns from Fort Knox and especially at Christmas the media would feature the soldiers, which always looked exciting and cool.

He began thinking about the Army, even though his wife wanted no part of it. One day he walked past a recruiting station and everything came together.

“There was a poster in the window, it had Uncle Sam on it and what it said was, ‘If not you, then who?’”

This was at a time when the Iran hostage situation was happening and Ronald Reagan was elected president, which gave him hope that it was the right time to join the Army. Little did he know at that time, the Amy would become his career.

Veterans Journey to the Past

When Niles and Greenwell retired, they left active duty behind but not the military. They both had a lifelong interest in military history and Bryan County is a hotbed of history.

When Greenwell retired in 2004, he started a civil service career. His wife worked with a woman whose husband was a reenactor. For at least a year they pestered him to participate.

“They finally wore me down,” he said. “They said, ‘We’re going to this place called Broxton Bridge. We’ll pay for you, we’ll give you everything you need.”

They loaned him a shirt, which he accidentally tore, and put him out in the field—from that day, he was hooked.

“That was the very first (reenactment) I ever went to and I loved it, loved it,” he said. “I had my little debit card … in my hand and I went to the … sutlers. I pulled that card out and I bought everything I needed short of a rifle.”

He joined the Eighth Georgia/68th Ohio, which are Civil War reenactors units that reenact Civil War battles and do living histories.

He and Niles both consider what they do as living history rather than reenacting.

“I prefer to do living histories where we fire the cannon, we fire the muskets, you interact with the people, as opposed to a reenactment,” he said. “Reenactors play a script, you are acting, you don’t interact with people. They don’t talk to you, you don’t talk to them. You are doing a performance.”

As living historians, they talk to people, answer questions, and explain Civil War history from the Union and the Confederate stances. They don’t get into the politics of the time rather they talk about how the soldiers lived, and what their equipment and their day-to-day lives were like.

Another reason neither gravitate to reenacting is that after a career that saw them deployed in war zones and sleeping outside, they are done with that.

“Reenactors, a lot of times they’ll stay overnight out in the woods, trying to live like Civil War soldiers lived,” Niles said. “I really have no desire to do that because Civil War soldiers were miserable most of the time, and I did enough of that tactical camping when I was in the Army. If I’m camping now, I’m gonna have a cooler, a beer, and probably we’re sleeping in a trailer or something not on the ground with mosquitoes.”

After active duty, he worked as a park ranger at Fort Pulaski as an interpreter. That job included shooting cannons and muskets and dressing in the Civil War uniforms. He did that for six years but the drive eventually prompted him to leave that position and get involved with Fort McAllister.

“Like Cecil, I don’t consider myself a reenactor I’m more of an interpretive volunteer,” he said. “I pretty much do the same thing I did as a ranger. I give tours of the Fort, I do musket demos, cannon demos, and talk about the history of the Civil War.”

19th vs. 21st Century Soldiers

With wake-up, Reveille, light’s out, sick call, police call, guard mount, work call and chow the Army was still the Army in the mid-1800s

“We didn’t invent anything, we carried it on,” Greenwell said. “Wars don’t change all that much. Weapons do, tactics might, but combat itself doesn’t. If ya been there, ya realize that. I was in a front-line cavalry unit (3 ACR) as a gunner on an M1A1 Abrams tank named ‘Gotta Go!’ We were the front line.”

Just as the veterans who came before them in any number of wars, soldiers left their homes and families to travel to foreign places.

“We initially lived in a large camp in the desert,” Greenwall said. “The environment was not great, but bearable. It was a new experience for us. We lived in tents, had one meal of hot food daily, and a turkey Thanksgiving dinner. We could call home occasionally, and get mail delivery. We took showers and got a day off once in a while.”

As the battle drew closer, tent life was gone. Life and the environment hardened. The mission didn’t change. They lived on the tank, slept on the tank, every night regardless of rain, frost, and sand storms.

“I didn’t take a shower for 42 days once the fighting started,” he said. “No mail, water rationing, no hot food, no radio reception. We wore the same smelly clothes every day. It was our life out there; primal. We were briefed that 25% of us were expected to be killed in our initial assault. We were sent there to complete a mission and weren’t leaving until we did.”

Civil War soldiers, regardless of what side they fought, experienced the same emotions and hard times. When looking at the similarities between them and today’s soldiers, Niles said most of them are young and green.

“My first 10 years was peacetime,” he said. “And then 911 happened and I was green. I’d done a bunch of training but it’s not the real thing.”

There are also similarities in the protocol, but also some stark differences.

“The way soldiers talk to non-commissioned officers, the banter between them, would never have happened,” Greenwell said.

Discipline wasn’t meted out with pushups or an Article 13; Civil War soldiers were flogged for disobedience; others were shot or hung for desertion.

While there are similarities, some of the biggest differences is in the equipment.

“Our musket in the Civil War was pretty heavy,” Niles said. “It’s heavier than in the modern-day Army rifle but overall the modern-day soldier carries weight with the body armor and helmet and all the equipment.”

At the end of the day, soldiers are soldiers whether they fought on American soil or in far-away lands—they took lives, watched their comrades fall; they shot and were shot at.

“When it was over, we were thankful to be alive, and just wanted to go home,” Greenwell said. “Just like them; both sides, Union and Confederate. There is an old saying, ‘Same blood; different mud.’ A main reason I impart their story is because it’s also my story, 100-plus years later. You had to experience that to truly make that connection. Flintlock or M1A1, it’s the same.”