Left wheel. ON THE DOUBLE!

This past week I took a class entitled "Diverging Americas: Antecedents of the Civil War" at Pamplin Park. The class was most enjoyable and I really learned a lot about the time period preceeding the Civil War.

The real story comes from class this past Thursday where we took the roll of a Civil War soldier. Our instructor took us out side and drilled us as though we were a regiment of soldiers. Considering that this class was filled with all middle aged women and myself one can guess how well this went. Had we been in the war I believe our regiment would have been routed in less than 5 minutes. We spent about 20 minutes training and learning the movements of a Civil War regiment. We marched in columns, battle lines, and in road formation. We about faced, double quicked, and wheeled, and once we were trained the real fun began...

Now it was embarassing enough to be doing this in front of the teachers of the course and those who work at Pamplin, but then in marches a "regiment" of 10 year olds. Now these kids were on point. They had their movements down and had come to crush the teacher regiment. These kids showed us up and made us look bad. We were messy and could not hold our line, and had those kids had bullets most of us would be dead.

I am proud to say we lost the war to about 20 ten year olds..